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> 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.

> 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.

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.

The people who did best during the gold rush were the people who went out and were lucky enough to find stockpiles of gold.

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...

> 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.

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

It didn’t and I’m not sure anyone who knew anything about at-scale manufacturing ever saw it that way. Injection molding is far cheaper per unit and more accurate.

But 3D printing has made a major impact on prototyping. Parts that would have taken serious machine shop work or outsourcing can be printed in a few hours. It really changed the game for mechanical engineers.

In terms of vibe coding, time to demo/prototype is greatly reduced. That definitely takes time and cost away from R&D. But I don’t know that it’s had much impact on transfer to manufacturing, which can easily be the hard final 20%.

> 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.

It seems like a lot of vibe coders are people who otherwise wouldn't be coding at all.

3D printing is giving my company many benefits over injection molding. We have 6 variations of the case for our device and we're always coming up with improvements and new functionality, and new products. I only see us expanding our in-house print farm instead of building out injection molds. No, we aren't selling millions of units, but injection molding is just too expensive for anything but a 1-size-fits-all solution.

It was promised but it never materialised. Everyone was saying we'd all have a 3D printer at home and there'd be no market for niche products any more because we'd just print them on demand.

Correct. Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”. Almost always it was just people glad they could build things.

Its also interesting how the author frames the results: Shenzhen is now better than it was ever before at manufacturing. The maker culture succeeded!

>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.

Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?

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

I've frequently argued to my organization's leadership that the product could be open source on GitHub with a flashing neon sign above it and it wouldn't change anything about the business. A competitor stealing our codebase would probably be worse off than if they had done anything else. Conway's law and all that.

One of the odd things people do with tech is taking someone else's random projections at face value?

What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars", or "every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production"?

The people creating these narratives may a) truly believe it and tried to make it a reality, but failed b) never believed it at all, but failed anyway, c) or be somewhere else on this quadrant of belief vs actuality.

Why not just treat it as, "a prediction that went wrong". I suppose it's because a narrative of promise feels like a promise, and people don't like being lied to.

It's a strange narrative maneuver we keep doing with tech, which is more future-facing than most fields.

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

There was a point of time where some people looked at 3d printers and said "Wow, imagine how great this technology will be in 20 years." There was some amount of anticipation for multi-material printers to come around and for home printers to begin replacing traditional consumer goods. Compared to crypto, vr, and ai it doesn't look like much but 3d printing did go through a hype bubble.

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

It's really hard to beat injection molding for scale.

However, what 3D printing did shift was building molds and prototypes. And that shifted small volume manufacturing--one offs and small volumes are now practical that didn't used to be. In addition, you can iterate more easily over multiple versions.

The limiting factor, however, has always been the brain power designing the thing. YouTube is littered with videos that someone wants to build a "thing" and then spends 10-20 iterations figuring out everything they didn't know going into the project. This is no different from "real" projects, but your experienced engineering staff probably only take 5 iterations instead of 20.

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

it's the people that sell the pickaxe pickaxes.

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

I think I have a conversation at least weekly where I have to explain to someone that using an LLM to convert COBOL to Java (or whatever) will not actually save much effort. I don’t know how many ways to explain that translating the literal instructions from one language to another is not actually is not that hard for someone fluent in both and the actual bottleneck is in understanding what sort of business logic the COBOL has embedded in it and all the foundational rearchitecting that will involve.

> I never heard that.

Once the predictions of a magical future turn out to be false, techies suddenly don't remember. Kind of like when the cult leader's prediction of doomsday doesn't show, there's always another magical prediction of a new future coming. Here are just a few major mainstream sources:

2012, Cornell Prof and Lab Director, in CNN: "We really want to print a robot that will walk out of a printer. We have been able to print batteries and motors, but we haven’t been able to print the whole thing yet. I think in two or three years we’ll be able to do that." (https://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/tech/3d-printing-manufacturin...)

2013, World Economic Forum: "the world can be altered further if home-based 3D printing becomes the norm. In this world, every home is equipped with a printer capable of making most of the products it needs. Supply chains that support the flow of products and parts to consumers will vanish, to be replaced by supply chains of raw material." (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2013/08/will-3d-printing-kil...)

2013, President of the United States of America Barack Obama hypes up 3-D printing in the State of the Union as a technology that will bring manufacturing back to the U.S.: “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything..." Obama announced plans for three more manufacturing hubs where businesses will partner with the departments of Defense and Energy “to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs.” (https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/13/tech/innovation/obama-3d-...)

2012, Cover story and special issue of The Economist predicting another Nth industrial revolution:

"THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week’s special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides.

A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation—and may look more like those weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line." (archive: https://communicateasia.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/manufacturi...)

> 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).

There were articles posted on HN hyping exactly that, with comments debating whether 3D-printing would eventually replace conventional manufacturing at scale, and how people would no longer shop at stores like Walmart for their cheap products.

The people selling vibe code pick-axes are buying them for 50 dollars and selling them for 20. Not sure if they will do the best

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

Uh, no they're not. Did you not see the recent announcement from unity. One short prompt and you get a whole AAA+ game in one shot.

/s

vibe coding is only "more efficient" if you ignore the massive energy costs involved

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…

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

Yep. Increases output but reduces understanding.

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

I might be tilting at a strawman of your definition of vibe coding - apologies in advance if so.

But LLM-aided development is helping me get my hands dirty.

Last weekend, I encountered a bug in my Minecraft server. I run a small modded server for my kids and I to play on, and a contraption I was designing was doing something odd.

I pulled down the mod's codebase, the fabric-api codebase (one of the big modding APIs), and within an hour or so, I had diagnosed the bug and fixed it. Claude was essential in making this possible. Could I have potentially found the bug myself and fixed it? Almost certainly. Would I have bothered? Of course not. I'd have stuck a hopper between the mod block and the chest and just hacked it, and kept playing.

But, in the process of making this fix, and submitting the PR to fabric, I learned things that might make the next diagnosis or tweak that much easier.

Of course it took human judgment to find the bug, characterize it, test it in-game. And look! My first commit (basically fully written by Claude) took the wrong approach! [1]

Through the review process I learned that calling `toStack` wasn't the right approach, and that we should just add a `getMaxStackSize` to `ItemVariantImpl`. I got to read more of the codebase, I took the feedback on board, made a better commit (again, with Claude), and got the PR approved. [2]

They just merged the commit yesterday. Code that I wrote (or asked to have written, if we want to be picky) will end up on thousands of machines. Users will not encounter this issue. The Fabric team got a free bugfix. I learned things.

Now, again - is this a strawman of your point? Probably a little. It's not "vibe coding going straight to production." Review and discernment intervened to polish the commit, expertise of the Fabric devs was needed. Sending the original commit straight to "production" would have been less than ideal. (arguably better than leaving the bug unfixed, though!)

But having an LLM help doesn't have to mean that less understanding and instinct is built up. For this case, and for many other small things I've done, it just removed friction and schlep work that would otherwise have kept me from doing something useful.

This is, in my opinion, a very good thing!

[1]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e3...

[2]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah but now vibe coding will make DIY-ers look like a bunch of luddites.

And mastering a technology has lost its point.

Making isn't dead, but the movement is. There is no longer a large gap of people who are gaining interested in it but who haven't yet figured out how to get started. Now, everyone who wants to make it is already doing it.

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

I feel like the "maker movement" was more a corporate effort to commoditize tools and supplies to sell to makers. Not to mention selling the lifestyle of "maker".

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)

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.

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.

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

I mean this happens in normal development?

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

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.

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.

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?

Circuit design has been on the cusp of being automated ever since there were computers. It's been over twenty years of autolayout tools and they're still not very good.

Maybe you could research how to make your own PCBs? It can be done at home with a little equipment and then you can offer it as a service to others.

plugging Osh Park as a non overseas PCB alternative (no affiliation)

[0] https://oshpark.com/

The outsource-prompting-to-India stage will almost entirely be skipped (it already has been).

Developing nations that were looking to tech to climb the economic ladder, are watching that ladder be pulled up.

Most of the upside will go to the US and China. Europe is lagging shockingly on AI spend, they're extremely far behind (but with constant plan announcements). If you didn't know any better, you'd think Europe believed the year was 2010.

updated the title of the linked article instead :)

>> 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.

> This version of the Maker Movement only ever existed in news articles and hype bubbles.

That version of the Maker Movement was heavily pushed by city and the state government in Massachusetts. They put money into it; foundations funded it.

It was seen as a way to give students another pathway for those who weren't interested in going to college. I've seen first hand how some kids who weren't interested school or academics really got into the Maker thing, which got them into STEM.

Some of them ended up going to college to study engineering and related fields. Some of them ended up working in related fields and started their own businesses.

As time went on, it became clear to me that the Maker Movement wasn’t going to go mainstream, although 3D printing has found another niche audience recently in the home lab space. Many home-labbers on YouTube 3D print their own cases and other parts.

There will be normies that take up vibe coding like some knit their own sweaters or grow their own food because they enjoy it.

And there will be Fortune 500 companies that will vibe code certain products.

"Laundering". It's running the source through an LLM to escape the license.

Appreciate this re: maker movement perhaps being too aesthetically oriented and hence missing out on perhaps the real scenius

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.

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.

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.

IoT security was already enough of a shitshow before vibe coding, now we can reach levels of botnet never thought possible.

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.

The irony of this ai generated comment replying in defense of ai coding on hackernews. This entire vicchenai account has used llms to generate its entire comment history. What is the benefit to the owner of the account? What do they get out of this?