itunpredictable 2026-02-26 17:13 UTC link

The author of this article gives a more balanced POV than mine. I think most (maybe overwhelming majority) of publicized vibe coding projects are complete technical virtue signaling.

fhub 2026-02-26 17:21 UTC link

The “maker movement” isn’t dead and it wasn’t born recently either. People have been DIYing for all sorts of reasons for very long time.

a1o 2026-02-26 17:49 UTC link

I have a feeling that the maker movement specific being talked here was with meetups for showcasing things (fairs?) and with local hackerspaces at the age of the makerbot as the “game changer” 3D printer. If that is the case that one was captured by corporations - and for makerbot, the Stratasys “takeover”. I guess the AI/vibe coding was born from corporations but with local models there is this promise to move it to easier/more open access. I feel it’s too soon to tell to trace part of the parallels. I also feel the Maker movement cited was at a better age for Blogs, so lots of the vibe coding may just be happening without an audience.

windex 2026-02-26 17:58 UTC link

Far more people are coding and participating and creating things now than before. Doesn't matter what you call it. There is enough excitement.

rglover 2026-02-26 18:05 UTC link

> When you spend two years making useless Arduino projects, you develop instincts about electronics, materials, and design that you can’t get from a tutorial. When vibe coding goes straight to production, you lose that developmental space. The tool is powerful enough to produce real output before the person using it has developed real judgment.

The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

jmull 2026-02-26 18:40 UTC link

> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).

Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself. There’s certainly a cost, but hardly the only one if you’re trying to be the next big startup (for that, the high cost of coding was useful — something to deter potential competitors; you’ll have to make up the difference in some other way now).

Also, software is something that already scaled really well in the way businesses need it to — code written once, whether by human or LLM, can be executed billions of times for almost nothing. Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.

As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.

jamiecode 2026-02-26 18:49 UTC link

The failure mode split nobody's naming: Claude gets regexes right about 95% of the time, which is annoying but catchable. Gets auth logic or state management right 95% of the time and you've got silent data corruption showing up 3 months later on an edge case nobody tested.

Vibe coders treating those as the same category is what actually worries me. Even in regular software there's a feedback mechanism - unit tests go red, CI breaks. Vibe coding skips that too. You get working code that passes the happy path and nothing that tells you which 5% failure rate is the dangerous one. That judgment about problem category severity is the thing that's hard to develop without breaking things first.

stavros 2026-02-26 18:50 UTC link

I don't know about anyone else, but since vibe coding, I'm making more things than I've ever made before. Just a constant stream of making, all day.

Couldn't be happier. I make things because I want to see them exist, not because it was hard.

waffletower 2026-02-26 18:57 UTC link

The author writes as if he didn't know 'aider' even existed. "Vibe coding skipped that phase entirely" is dead wrong. What may be different is that the cycle was incredibly short before Anthropic made it mainstream with Claude Code. Gemini CLI, definitely a Claude Code imitator, existed long before The New York Times knew what Claude Code was. Openclaw -- a decidedly different agentic AI application -- is part of another period where weirdos are playing with tools.

giancarlostoro 2026-02-26 18:59 UTC link

Did the maker movement end? I dont think so, its just as niche as its always been. We have plenty of maker type posts on here. I dont think “vibe” coding is going away. Especially with so many open source models you can run on a simple Mac.

w10-1 2026-02-26 19:55 UTC link

I disagree with too much philosophizing around both Makers and vibe coding. The actual incentives are curiosity and a desire to build what one cannot buy (and using that for teaching initiative in kids) - not AGI or transforming society.

Physical making is hard: you run up against the limits of plastic or the difficulty of cnc planning for various materials, as well as the limited value for small projects: people rarely make entire projects, instead making parts. So there is an upper bound for the utility of making. (btw, anyone have a laser welder or steel-capable CNC's they're tired of?)

Software making is what you make it, subject to the laws of complexity, and as valuable as its integration (computers, robotics). These in theory are limiting, but in practice there are effectively an infinite supply of valuable projects when the cost of production reduces. Deployments will be limited by access to customers, which is not a problem when people make software for themselves.

0xbadcafebee 2026-02-26 20:00 UTC link

Nah. The most universal rule of human nature is humans be lazy. Makers do extra effort for no real gain. Vibe coders do less effort for more gain. Vibe coding is what everyone wanted computers to be from the beginning. Tell it what to do, it does it.

Actually, the future isn't vibe coding, it's vibe agenting. GPT 5.3 is so advanced, you don't need to write a program to do something. You tell the agent what you want, and it does it for you by "using" desktop apps like a person. If it can't do it manually, it'll write a program to do it. That's where we're headed.

davesque 2026-02-26 22:03 UTC link

I don't understand this. I use agentic coding to do things more quickly. And it's not just toys. I end up with software that both works and is useful. Assuming AI models powerful enough to drive that process continue to be available, why would I stop doing it?

nicetryguy 2026-02-26 22:29 UTC link

Ok, i just generally disagree with the premise. Why does it have to be "100% vibe coded" or "0% vibe coded"? There is a very happy medium that is getting ignored here. As a coder with various language experiences, i can just get like a good kick and a template with Claude and continue in any language i want and have the LLM do the redundant parts. As someone with some soldering experience, i could have an LLM cook up and explain a circuit that might have taken me months trying to mangle myself. I think LLMs empower creativity more than ever, and creative people can have a wonderful time with LLMs softening the initial headbanging and tedious redundancies of any project.

ogou 2026-02-26 23:42 UTC link

The maker movement evolved. It didn't disappear. Once the tools became accessible to a much wider audience, such as children, it became an integrated aspect of education. It also became a cultural tool. The author is focusing on a very narrow path to monetization and manufacturing. That wasn't the goal of the movement at all. That was how startup pitches tried to capture the movement and extract value. I see 3D printing machines that create structures out of adobe now. Huge ones. I see whole niche industries coming from laser cutters and CnC machines. People who started on Arduino boards now build music synthesizers and modular synth components. That movement continues and now offers a wide array of dividends.

maxdo 2026-02-26 23:59 UTC link

I feel bad about the author . The entire post is a religious denial of the reality.

It’s obvious with each iteration of llms that vibe code , write-only-code is here to stay in many industries if not everywhere.

fooker 2026-02-27 00:29 UTC link

There is no getting around the fact that projects that used to take man-years are possible in an afternoon now.

And this is the worst this technology is ever going to be :)

Don't take my word for it, go try building something that you always wanted to build but did not have time for. If you do not have something like that at the back of your head, I doubt you have to be concerned about this topic.

peteforde 2026-02-27 01:45 UTC link

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously.

The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby.

Meanwhile, we're in a golden era of tool access. It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers. I have a freaking pick and place in my home.

Also, you can have custom PCBs shipped to you in a week for about $10.

Having LLMs available at the same time as all of these tools are rapidly evolving means that anyone with an idea can prototype just about anything. In my worldview, anyone not excited about this either has no original ideas or a cynical agenda.

I'd say more but I have to get back to work on my maker projects.

numpad0 2026-02-27 02:53 UTC link

> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.

> You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping flows upward. It accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.

dot dot dot.

vannevar 2026-02-27 17:04 UTC link

The enormous difference between vibe-coding and 3D printing is that vibe-coding is improving exponentially at a rapid rate, while 3D printing is improving linearly at a slow rate. Very little that we say about vibe-coding today is likely to be valid even six months' from now, whereas a 3D printer sold 5 years from now will probably be very similar to one sold today.

GrinningFool 2026-02-26 17:20 UTC link

I think it's often genuine excitement to share a thing - without quite processing that anybody with the same idea can now build it (for simple- to mid-complexity projects).

Mars008 2026-02-26 17:34 UTC link

If anything it was just boosted with introduction of cheap 3d printers.

throwway120385 2026-02-26 17:34 UTC link

What's new is this concept of the "maker movement" as a distinct counterculture. It's relatively easy to go buy parts and materials and make things. People 30 or 40 years ago who built stuff instead of buying it didn't really identify as anything because that was just what you did when you wanted something. Whereas nowadays you can buy pretty much anything on Amazon, even things that are fit for a very specific purpose.

For example, if you wanted a pretty dress with a specific fabric and cut, you would likely have had to sew it yourself or pay a tailor because your off-the-rack options would be limited, costly, or ill-fitting. But people just did that without fanfare and it wasn't a counterculture. Or if you wanted custom cabinets or resin-coated live-edge stair treads, etc. You'd just figure out how to make it if you wanted it. Or you could pay someone else to do it.

lanfeust6 2026-02-26 17:42 UTC link

Even if status-signaling through this vector loses it's lustre, AI slop (agentic or otherwise) will not, and some of that slop will take on the guise of "vibe-coding" projects.

dylan604 2026-02-26 17:42 UTC link

For people that have been doing something for some time, it's kind of funny when their old thing becomes new. Old things are now suddenly becoming internet famous and starts trending, so it suddenly becomes "new". Eventually, those new comers that only came along as trend followers fall away. That leaves the OG people plus some of the new comers that will stick around. Eventually, a new generation will discover it and it becomes "new" in whatever circles they run.

lm28469 2026-02-26 18:03 UTC link

If you see it through a cynical capitalist lens you could argue the maker movement is just an engineered market segment, how many people bought raspberry pis, arduino, 3d printers and barely use them? Do they actually make things or do they watch videos of influencers making things and selling them the dream (and tools)

MattGrommes 2026-02-26 18:04 UTC link

Yeah, I have no idea what this guy is talking about. I still get Make magazine full of people making projects every month. My youtube feed is similarly full of people making stuff and sharing it with the community.

Check out the Maker Project Lab weekly video showcasing awesome stuff from the maker community, it's inspiring and fun to see. https://www.youtube.com/@MakerProjectLab

bool3max 2026-02-26 18:13 UTC link

You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

LastTrain 2026-02-26 18:34 UTC link

I’m no fan of vibe coding but I usually find that people who use the term virtue signaling have none and hate those that do.

Conscat 2026-02-26 18:46 UTC link

I was a kid at the time, but adults, magazines, and other children convinced me that 3D printing at home would likely replace a huge number of products. This included extremely optimistic speculation, like printers producing smart phones or houses. Then I dated a boy who used his 3D printer to substitute The Container Store at a higher cost with greater effort and lower quality, and that soured me on the concept.

jvanderbot 2026-02-26 18:46 UTC link

> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale

No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.

alwa 2026-02-26 18:53 UTC link

Then again, sophisticated manufactured electronics had long been cheap and available by the time somebody thought to create Arduino as a platform in the first place.

And even today, people hack on assembly and ancient mainframe languages and demoscene demos and Atari ROMs and the like (mainly for fun but sometimes with the explicit intention of developing that flavor of judgment).

I predict with high confidence that not even Claude will stop tinkerers from tinkering.

All of our technical wizardry will become anachronistic eventually. Here I stand, Ozymandius, king of motorcycle repair, 16-bit assembly, and radio antennae bent by hand…

ramathornn 2026-02-26 18:58 UTC link

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

Fully agree - We already saw dev prices drop significantly when offshore dev shops spun up. I've had great, and also horrible experiences working with devs that could produce lines of code at a fraction of the price of any senior type dev.

The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hourly rate because of the way they approach problems and the solutions they come up with.

Agents are great at building out features, i'm not so sure about complex software that grows over time. Unless you know the right questions to ask, the agent misses alot. 80/20 doesn't work for systems that need 100% reliability.

OakNinja 2026-02-26 19:01 UTC link

I recently wrote a blog post about exactly this, and I agree with your perspective. Vibe coding helps with showing other people your idea and get them to understand it, try it and, most importantly, help you fail fast. But as the product matures, the gains of using LLM's and agentic engineering will go from 10000% efficiency to something like maybe 30(?)% productivity gain? Which is still awesome, of course.

"The real test of Vibe coding is whether people will finally realize the cost of software development is in the maintenance, not in the creation."

https://blog.oak.ninja/shower-thoughts/2026/02/12/business-i...

jlundberg 2026-02-26 19:02 UTC link

This is an intresting take and the ”tooling” around pure llm-based code generation is what really matters.

AFAIK Replit and Claude code has way to reduce the rate of these kind of errors, but I havn’t deep dived into how.

whazor 2026-02-26 19:03 UTC link

With agentic loops, you specify what you want and it continues to do stuff until ‘it works’. Then publish. Its takes less time and attention. So projects are less thought out and less tested as well.

In the end, I think it’s not about how a project was created. But how much passion and dedication went into it. It’s just that the bar got lowered.

KaiserPro 2026-02-26 19:06 UTC link

To me the maker movement is alive as ever. Sure the arduino has died a death, but pico, esp32 and various other microcontrollers evolved the entire system, and with wifi too.

dnautics 2026-02-26 19:10 UTC link

> you've got silent data corruption showing up 3 months later on an edge case nobody tested

I mean this happens in normal development?

gowld 2026-02-26 19:17 UTC link

Couldn't one rebut that Arduino is plug-and-play without getting your hands dirty in lower-level electronics?

teaearlgraycold 2026-02-26 19:20 UTC link

A fault in a regex could be really bad news depending on where it’s used.

teaearlgraycold 2026-02-26 19:24 UTC link

To be clear I’m not sure what I’m doing is vibe coding because I write some of the code and read/understand what the LLM writes.

I think I’m learning less (about the code) but making more. Maybe that’s okay? There are other things to learn about. My code has users, it processes money. I user test, I iterate, I see what works and what they need.

fishpen0 2026-02-26 19:32 UTC link

I think it stunted out. Outside of only the densest areas, maker spaces never really formed. The stuff remains accessible as a hobby only to the wealthy who can afford all these tools and machines in the majority of the country. I'm a nearly 40 minute drive to the closest maker space and I'm in one of the 10 densest populated cities in the country. The last city I lived in, the maker space was too popular and raised their fees so high that it is also impossibly inaccessible to most people.

lich_king 2026-02-26 19:54 UTC link

> I never heard that

I did, a lot, maybe fifteen years ago. There was a lot of talk about a "3D printing revolution" and being years away from being able to make whatever you want at home. For a while, the "maker" moniker was strongly associated with home manufacturing maximalists.

I still don't get the point the article is making, though. That 3D printer thinking was obviously naive because it underestimated the difficulty of mechanical design and the importance of the economies of scale. Using AI to "write" or "code" is a lot easier than turning a vague idea for a household good into a durable and aesthetic 3D print, so it's apples to oranges.

There are other things that the vibecoding movement is underestimating - when you pay a SaaS vendor, you're usually not paying for code as much as for having a turnkey solution where functionality, security, infrastructure, and user support are someone else's problem. But I think that's pretty much where the parallels end.

HerbManic 2026-02-26 20:03 UTC link

Yep. Increases output but reduces understanding.

Bjartr 2026-02-26 20:37 UTC link

It didn't end, it just failed to commercialize, which IMO is a better outcome anyway. Many more communities today have something akin to a maker space than before the movement. It succeeded to a point that it became mundane.

inigyou 2026-02-26 20:40 UTC link

At the same time, the quality of all this is absolute dogshit poor, so the market for things that actually work properly is probably still there. Which CEO recently had OpenClaw delete all their mail?

boznz 2026-02-26 20:44 UTC link

Ditto. I have done 6 projects over the last 12 months, and wrote up 3 of them on my web site, I also usually post a link either here, or hackaday, or the other maker sites, most of my work these days is repurposing broken commercial or consumer electronics by replacing the PCB's to give things a second life (eg <https://rodyne.com/?p=3380>). I've been making things since 1981, vibe coding just makes it easier for me to work with more complicated stuff.

smileysteve 2026-02-26 20:47 UTC link

> Did the maker movement end? I dont think so

Bump.

Because we had our first high profile murder using a 3d printed weapon just last year.

techblueberry 2026-02-26 22:08 UTC link

Th is isn't discussing individuals, it's discussing trends as a whole. There are still plenty of makers getting value out of 3d printers as well, but it's not everyone like we talk about everyone becoming a software developer with vibe coding.

keybored 2026-02-26 22:19 UTC link

And I make visualizations by watching TV every day. My visual cortex just has a constant stream of making visualizations all day.

All these maker types dropping that differentiator immediately in the name of pragmatism.

Editorial Channel

What the content says

Structural Channel

What the site does