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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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)
Plenty of people fall in both camps of DIY and vibe coding. Just last week I used codex to write me so great scad file so that I now have a token generator for my multi color 3d printer. Vibe Coding can allow makers to go further quicker.
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.
The title of the linked article is "Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement" but the title on Hacker News is "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?" - I think the original title should be restored.
The maker movement is not dead but it's a far more niche audience. Don't get me wrong, get a 3d printer and an arduino(or arduino like equivalent), endure a week of suffering and you are hooked for life: this was my own experience and anyone that I know that has ever gone down that road. ~~vibe~~ Slop coding won't die either but there a lot of people will get a cold shower sooner or later: some already have. All ai slop is a russian roulette where the players may not even know they are playing and the gun is a backwards revolver. I can't say whether slop coding will professionally die before or after the burst of the AI bubble, but everyone is starting to realize that slop is unmaintainable, inefficient and full of bugs when you factor in all the edge cases no slop machine will ever cover. AI can exist in non-professional spaces and hobby projects, though I'd argue it may be equally as dangerous for the people that use it and those around them: you are only one firewall-cmd away from leaking all your personal data.
As for the parallels with the maker movements, here's one example: drones are one of my hobbies. I love drones and I've built countless fpv ones. For anyone that hasn't done that, the main thing to know is that no two self-build drones are the same - custom 3d printed parts, tweaks, tons of fiddling about. The main difference is that while I am self-taught when it comes to drones, I have some decent knowledge in physics, I understand the implications of building a drone and what could go wrong: you won't see me flying any of my drones in the city - you may find me in some remote, secluded area, sure. The point is I am taking precautions to make sure that when I eventually crash my drone(not IF but WHEN), it will be in a tree 10km from anything that breathes. Slop code is something you live with and there are infinite ways to f-up. And way too many people are living in denial about it.
These promotional articles get more refined: They start with the negatives and then refute them in the last paragraphs.
None of these sophisticated articles mention that you could already steal open source with the press of a button before LLMs. The theft has just been automated with what vibe coders think is plausible deniability.
My general take on most vibe coding projects ("Hey, look, I built this over the weekend"), is general dismissiveness. Mostly because of the effort required, i.e. why should I care about something that someone did with almost zero effort, a few prompts?
If someone tells me they ran a marathon, I'm impressed because I know that took work. If someone tells me they jogged 100 meters, I don't care at all (unless they were previously crippled or morbidly obese etc.).
I think there are just a ton of none-engineers who are super hyped right now that they built something/anything, but don't have any internal benchmark or calibration about what is actually "good" or "impressive" when it comes to software, since they never built anything before, with AI or otherwise.
Even roughly a year ago, I made a 3D shooting game over an evening using Claude and never bothered sharing it because it seemed like pure slop and far too easy to brag about. Now my bar for being "impressed" by software is incredibly high, knowing you can few shot almost anything imaginable in a few hours.
I struggle with this feeling as well, a huge part of the Maker movement was excitement around people building and importantly learning how to build thing. Iterating and improving each time is a pretty common thread you'll see throughout the community. It's hard to have someone show you a thing they generated instead of made and to feel the same way. Yes, they played a part in that thing existing, and part of that person is reflected in the output, but I don't think most Makers would say the final output is goal, so what's there to be excited about?
It's hard to not be dismissive or gate-keeping with this stuff, my goal isn't to discourage anyone or to fight against the lower barriers to entry, but it's simply a different thing when someone prompts a private AI model to make a thing in an hour.
Why share something that anyone can just “prompt into existence”?
Architecture wise and also just from a code quality perspective I have yet to encounter AI generated code that passes my quality bar.
Vibe coding is great for a PoC but we usually do a full rewrite until it’s production ready.
————
Might be a hot take, but I don’t think people who can’t code should ship or publish code. They should learn to do it and AI can be a resource on the way.. but you should understand the code you “produce”. In the end it’s yours, not the AIs code.
Do people build to impress with an implementation that no one cares about really? Or to share the end product?
I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.
We probably need to come to terms with the idea that no one cares about those details. Really, 2 years ago no one would have cared about your hand crafted 3d shooter either I think.
A mix of perspectives in here that feel inter-related. The maker movement state-side leaned more "fun or artsy" while the real maker movement you could argue was thriving in China. Another darker way of looking at it is: if the maker movement was really believed to be a way to bring manufacturing back, it was effectively cargo-culting that by focusing only on a narrow set of building blocks. Maybe it's similar to building your own PC from parts at Fry's back at the day: that felt good... and you did feel you were really making something. But you were really doing final assembly and abstracting out the complexity of building those building blocks that went into it.
Anyway I think we are seeing a scenius phase -- it's just happening everywhere all at once on a world stage. And it's exciting. As with any moment in time there's a ton of experimentation and a small number of break-out hits. Also the pace of change means there's less staying power for a break-out hit than there used to be.
But the quick break-out hit phenomenon is particularly applicable for things that are more about the attention economy and less about the boring hidden things that traditionally have been where the economy's silent toil is really centered.
All of this makes me feel the author is too close to the creative end-consumer layer e.g. "make something flashy and cool whether it's a 3d-printer in a 5th avenue dept. store window, or a new app front end" but perhaps less focused on the full depth of things that really exist around them.
This really resonates with me in that a lot of NYC's "tech" circa 2013 was 3d printing oriented, much more so than in Silicon Valley. And I wondered why? but then it was a reflection that tech in NYC then was more about marketing, story telling, and less about the depth...
Obviously you had the west coast makers, you had the burners, so I don't mean to conflate all these differnet things. But the idea that Maker Faires were really about bringing manufacturing back... I don't know I think it was more about the counterculture, about having fun. I think that's coming back to tech right now as well in a sense. Even if it's also got dystopian overtones
Quick answer: No.
Long answer: its the opposite; as an example, can use claude code to generate, build and debug ESP32 code for a given purpose; suddenly everyone can build smart gizmos without having to learn c/c++ and having knowledge of a ton of libraries.
I have Arduino and raspberry Pi boards. I am perfectly capable of hand writing code that runs on these machines. But they are sitting in the drawer gathering dust, because I don't have a use case -- everything I could possibly do with them is either not actually useful on a daily basis, or there are much better & reliable solutions for the actual issue. I literally spent hours going through other people's projects (most of which are very trivial), and decided that I have better things to do with my time. Lots and lots of people have the same issue.
And Claude Code is not going to change a single bit of that.
So, because you don't see value in it, you assume its the same for everyone. Got it.
Also, its not about if there are better or more reliable options; that's the opposite of the maker mentality - you do it because it is useful, it is fun or just because you enjoy doing it.
Such as designing some light fixture, printing it, and illuminating it with an esp32 and some ws2812 leds. Yah you could spend an afternoon coding color transitions. Or use claude code for that.
I think the reality is that the maker movement slowed down not because it’s hard to learn c++ but because people don’t care enough. Will maybe twice as many people participate now? Sure. But that’ll still be a small fraction of people.
Not sure I see it like that. Micropython removes most of the rough edges of doing embedded C.
If you prefer no code then I suggest ESPHome for your ESP IoT projects.
I'd take vibecoded iot code any day vs the typical hot mess of poorly written code by non-experts following online tutorials and the casual stackoverflow copy-paste :)
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.
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).
This is the part I don't understand. It's like sharing a finger painting half the time. Yes, cool, but so what?
[Edit: no need for the downvote, folks, it was an honest question although it seemed otherwise. I think the answers below make sense.]
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.
> 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.
You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
> You're absolutely right
Bot detected
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
Yeah but now vibe coding will make DIY-ers look like a bunch of luddites.
And mastering a technology has lost its point.
Plenty of people fall in both camps of DIY and vibe coding. Just last week I used codex to write me so great scad file so that I now have a token generator for my multi color 3d printer. Vibe Coding can allow makers to go further quicker.
If anything it was just boosted with introduction of cheap 3d printers.
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.
Far more people are coding and participating and creating things now than before. Doesn't matter what you call it. There is enough excitement.
The title of the linked article is "Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement" but the title on Hacker News is "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?" - I think the original title should be restored.
updated the title of the linked article instead :)
The maker movement is not dead but it's a far more niche audience. Don't get me wrong, get a 3d printer and an arduino(or arduino like equivalent), endure a week of suffering and you are hooked for life: this was my own experience and anyone that I know that has ever gone down that road. ~~vibe~~ Slop coding won't die either but there a lot of people will get a cold shower sooner or later: some already have. All ai slop is a russian roulette where the players may not even know they are playing and the gun is a backwards revolver. I can't say whether slop coding will professionally die before or after the burst of the AI bubble, but everyone is starting to realize that slop is unmaintainable, inefficient and full of bugs when you factor in all the edge cases no slop machine will ever cover. AI can exist in non-professional spaces and hobby projects, though I'd argue it may be equally as dangerous for the people that use it and those around them: you are only one firewall-cmd away from leaking all your personal data.
As for the parallels with the maker movements, here's one example: drones are one of my hobbies. I love drones and I've built countless fpv ones. For anyone that hasn't done that, the main thing to know is that no two self-build drones are the same - custom 3d printed parts, tweaks, tons of fiddling about. The main difference is that while I am self-taught when it comes to drones, I have some decent knowledge in physics, I understand the implications of building a drone and what could go wrong: you won't see me flying any of my drones in the city - you may find me in some remote, secluded area, sure. The point is I am taking precautions to make sure that when I eventually crash my drone(not IF but WHEN), it will be in a tree 10km from anything that breathes. Slop code is something you live with and there are infinite ways to f-up. And way too many people are living in denial about it.
Wait - the maker movement ended?
These promotional articles get more refined: They start with the negatives and then refute them in the last paragraphs.
None of these sophisticated articles mention that you could already steal open source with the press of a button before LLMs. The theft has just been automated with what vibe coders think is plausible deniability.
"Laundering". It's running the source through an LLM to escape the license.
If you're vibecoding the start of the singularity... then may be yes.
My general take on most vibe coding projects ("Hey, look, I built this over the weekend"), is general dismissiveness. Mostly because of the effort required, i.e. why should I care about something that someone did with almost zero effort, a few prompts?
If someone tells me they ran a marathon, I'm impressed because I know that took work. If someone tells me they jogged 100 meters, I don't care at all (unless they were previously crippled or morbidly obese etc.).
I think there are just a ton of none-engineers who are super hyped right now that they built something/anything, but don't have any internal benchmark or calibration about what is actually "good" or "impressive" when it comes to software, since they never built anything before, with AI or otherwise.
Even roughly a year ago, I made a 3D shooting game over an evening using Claude and never bothered sharing it because it seemed like pure slop and far too easy to brag about. Now my bar for being "impressed" by software is incredibly high, knowing you can few shot almost anything imaginable in a few hours.
I struggle with this feeling as well, a huge part of the Maker movement was excitement around people building and importantly learning how to build thing. Iterating and improving each time is a pretty common thread you'll see throughout the community. It's hard to have someone show you a thing they generated instead of made and to feel the same way. Yes, they played a part in that thing existing, and part of that person is reflected in the output, but I don't think most Makers would say the final output is goal, so what's there to be excited about?
It's hard to not be dismissive or gate-keeping with this stuff, my goal isn't to discourage anyone or to fight against the lower barriers to entry, but it's simply a different thing when someone prompts a private AI model to make a thing in an hour.
Yeah - It feels similar to me.
Why share something that anyone can just “prompt into existence”?
Architecture wise and also just from a code quality perspective I have yet to encounter AI generated code that passes my quality bar.
Vibe coding is great for a PoC but we usually do a full rewrite until it’s production ready.
————
Might be a hot take, but I don’t think people who can’t code should ship or publish code. They should learn to do it and AI can be a resource on the way.. but you should understand the code you “produce”. In the end it’s yours, not the AIs code.
Do people build to impress with an implementation that no one cares about really? Or to share the end product?
I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.
We probably need to come to terms with the idea that no one cares about those details. Really, 2 years ago no one would have cared about your hand crafted 3d shooter either I think.
A mix of perspectives in here that feel inter-related. The maker movement state-side leaned more "fun or artsy" while the real maker movement you could argue was thriving in China. Another darker way of looking at it is: if the maker movement was really believed to be a way to bring manufacturing back, it was effectively cargo-culting that by focusing only on a narrow set of building blocks. Maybe it's similar to building your own PC from parts at Fry's back at the day: that felt good... and you did feel you were really making something. But you were really doing final assembly and abstracting out the complexity of building those building blocks that went into it.
Anyway I think we are seeing a scenius phase -- it's just happening everywhere all at once on a world stage. And it's exciting. As with any moment in time there's a ton of experimentation and a small number of break-out hits. Also the pace of change means there's less staying power for a break-out hit than there used to be.
But the quick break-out hit phenomenon is particularly applicable for things that are more about the attention economy and less about the boring hidden things that traditionally have been where the economy's silent toil is really centered.
All of this makes me feel the author is too close to the creative end-consumer layer e.g. "make something flashy and cool whether it's a 3d-printer in a 5th avenue dept. store window, or a new app front end" but perhaps less focused on the full depth of things that really exist around them.
This really resonates with me in that a lot of NYC's "tech" circa 2013 was 3d printing oriented, much more so than in Silicon Valley. And I wondered why? but then it was a reflection that tech in NYC then was more about marketing, story telling, and less about the depth...
Obviously you had the west coast makers, you had the burners, so I don't mean to conflate all these differnet things. But the idea that Maker Faires were really about bringing manufacturing back... I don't know I think it was more about the counterculture, about having fun. I think that's coming back to tech right now as well in a sense. Even if it's also got dystopian overtones
Appreciate this re: maker movement perhaps being too aesthetically oriented and hence missing out on perhaps the real scenius
TL;DR
Quick answer: No. Long answer: its the opposite; as an example, can use claude code to generate, build and debug ESP32 code for a given purpose; suddenly everyone can build smart gizmos without having to learn c/c++ and having knowledge of a ton of libraries.
For what purpose exactly?
I have Arduino and raspberry Pi boards. I am perfectly capable of hand writing code that runs on these machines. But they are sitting in the drawer gathering dust, because I don't have a use case -- everything I could possibly do with them is either not actually useful on a daily basis, or there are much better & reliable solutions for the actual issue. I literally spent hours going through other people's projects (most of which are very trivial), and decided that I have better things to do with my time. Lots and lots of people have the same issue.
And Claude Code is not going to change a single bit of that.
So, because you don't see value in it, you assume its the same for everyone. Got it.
Also, its not about if there are better or more reliable options; that's the opposite of the maker mentality - you do it because it is useful, it is fun or just because you enjoy doing it.
Such as designing some light fixture, printing it, and illuminating it with an esp32 and some ws2812 leds. Yah you could spend an afternoon coding color transitions. Or use claude code for that.
I think the reality is that the maker movement slowed down not because it’s hard to learn c++ but because people don’t care enough. Will maybe twice as many people participate now? Sure. But that’ll still be a small fraction of people.
Not sure I see it like that. Micropython removes most of the rough edges of doing embedded C. If you prefer no code then I suggest ESPHome for your ESP IoT projects.
IoT security was already enough of a shitshow before vibe coding, now we can reach levels of botnet never thought possible.
I'd take vibecoded iot code any day vs the typical hot mess of poorly written code by non-experts following online tutorials and the casual stackoverflow copy-paste :)