> 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.
> 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 think it's really dependent on the software. And frankly, with the current rate of development, I feel like this continues to shift.
No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.
Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.
I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.
I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.
I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.
It feels different now.
I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.
> 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.
I'm honestly just happy at the moment, because our two junior admins/platform engineers have made some really good points to me in preparation for their annual reviews.
One now completed his own bigger terraform project, with the great praise of "That looks super easy to maintain and use" from the other more experienced engineers. He figured: "It's weird, you actually end up thinking and poking at a problem for a week or two, and then it actually folds into a very small amount of code. And sure, Copilot helped a bit with some boilerplate, but that was only after figuring out how to structure and hold it".
The other is working on getting a grip on running the big temperamental beast called PostgreSQL. She was recently a bit frustrated. "How can it be so hard to configure a simple number! It's so easy to set it in ansible and roll it out, but to find the right value, you gotta search the entire universe from top to bottom and then the answer is <maybe>. AAaah I gotta yell at a team". She's on a good way to become a great DBA.
> 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.
Or if it's very structured and testable. For example, we're seeing great value in rebuilding a Grafana instance from manually managed to scripted dashboards. After a bit of scaffolding, some style instructions and a few example systems, you can just chuck it a description and a few queries, it just goes to successful work and just needs a little tweaking afterwards.
Similar, we're now converting a few remnants of our old config management to the new one using AI agents. Setup a good test suite first, then throw old code and examples of how the new config management does it into the context and modern models do that well. At that point, just rebuilding the system once is better than year-long deprecation plans with undecided stakeholders as mobile as a pet ferret that doesn't want to.
It's really not the code holding the platform together, it's the team and the experiences and behaviors of people.
We didn't even have to offshore for lots of bad code to be written.
Looks at the scores of Ycombinator startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and failed. Good ideas, pretty websites, but not a lot of substance under the hood. The VC gathering aspect and online kudos was way more important to them than actually producing good code and a reliable product that would stand the test of time.
Pretty much the most detestable section of the HN community. IMNHSO. I notice they're much quieter than usual since the whole vibe coding thing kicked off.
Here's the thing though, and with all due respect I say this as someone who has worked with offshore teams.
They were only as good as the input they were given. They rarely went above and beyond, and most of the time getting something "good enough" was challenging. Yes, time zones, cultural differences/attitudes, and their exposure/opportunities play a big role.
What I'm saying is that teams who had bad onshore employees got horrible results. Teams that had actual systems engineers and people who could architect systems usually got great results.
For example, we were building a bleeding edge (at the time) e commerce site for one of the largest companies in the entertainment space. I made sure to work with the best people I knew at the company to design the system from the ground up. Then, we made sure the actual "functional" pieces were digestible and written plainly that we didn't need to clarify words. Nor did we write a fucking 300 page technical document. We kept things simple and effective, and all the work was broken down into as atomic pieces as possible.
The end result was that we used a team distributed between Ukraine and India to build this in about 4 months. We'd do weekly sprints, and the team had great spirits too because we actually gave a fuck about them and ensuring their success. I'm sure they're used to being scapegoats because of some lazy fucks onshore.
Now I use agents daily and have great success. However, the whole "write a sentence and AI will do it for you" is obviously bullshit. I even asked HN why I got wrong results to test what people would respond (sorry for playing you) and as I predicted they blamed me thus proving that this broader sentiment that's so prominent by "thought leaders" is stupid as fuck. So, that's where we are.
People who can actually build great systems know that it requires careful planning, deep understanding, and ability to fill in the gaps.
One thought experiment I keep having when I see LLM hype: imagine if our outsourcing companies could be as blasé about copyright as OpenAI, and how profitable they could be.
I mean, rename some dudes over there to ‘transformer’, and let them copy & paste from GitHub with abandon… I know we could get a whole browser for less than a few grand.
We wouldn’t, because it’d be copyright-insane. But if we just got it indirect enough, maybe fed the info to the copiers through a ‘transforming’ browser to mirror the copyright argument, I bet we could outperform OpenAI in key metrics.
Coding is formalizing for the compiler. The other 99% of the job is softly getting the PHB not to fuck the entire company and being unique in not doing dumb shit everyone thinks is popular now but will regret soon. It’s all like IT tribal tattoos. Barely cool for a couple of years, and then a lifelong source of shielded regret.
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.
Also hiring. It's easier to find people with JIRA experience than people in your vibe-coded ticket manager, even if it is technically superior for your application.
If there is any commonality between the 3D printing craze and vibe-coding, they're both renditions of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
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.
I think we'll see this slowly march along. I just made some custom-designed speaker tilt mount things for my desk. Sure, it's a trivially simple example, but a lot of things are. I was able to get the exact angle I wanted, bigger than most and in a design I liked, crafted by AI in 5 minutes, and on my desk by the next morning and for a fraction of the price of a Chinese made Amazon version.
It's no replicator, but give it 5 years and it might be surprising how useful it is.
Just like with vibecoding complains, have you tried the latest models (of 3d printers)? Specifically, Bambu's latest models make the printer a device to just use rather than the project itself. It's the Apple of 3d printing. Previously, you'd spend hours on calibrating and leveling nonsense. Latest models don't have this problem. Open the app on your phone, (doom)scroll until you find something, and just hit print from your phone. You can make it more complicated as desired, but it's not necessary to get something out of your printer.
Which apes vibecoding. ChatGPT 3.5 was laughably bad compared to codex 5.3, but if you're basing your opinion on 3.5's performance, your opinion's out of date.
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."
It's not awesome, not for us. 30% productivity gain would be enormous. Just imagine 30% of developers losing their jobs, in addition to outsourcing and all the new graduates flooding out of colleges after CS has been hyped so much in the recent years.
I personally wouldn't trust the 3D-printing community. The pre-bambu lab days were pretty bleak.
Print quality is everything when it comes to 3D printing. The printing quality must keep increasing if 3D prints are to be used as finished products. People should stop printing STL artifacts into their prints. Layer lines must fade away into invisibility. Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping. New coatings need to be developed for texturing 3d printed parts and the parts need to be ready for coating right from the print bed.
Definitely a fantasy land ideal. Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP. It's just never going to exist because reality just isn't that way.
> 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.
> 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%.
> I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?
It absolutely was the "promise" the media spun.
I had the relatively unique experience of moving from being an outsider to this field to being an insider. While I was an outsider, my impressions, formed by the media, was exactly that—3d printing would be the next big revolution, in a few years there'd be a printer in every home, etc.
I then joined a company that allocated a lot of resources to 3d printing. It only took me a month or two to realize that the big media claims were absolutely ridiculous, and didn't make any sense as stated. They misunderstood the state of the technology, and misunderstood basic economics and how regular manufacturing works.
That's not to say there's no value in 3d printing or the maker movement. There's a ton of value that's been uncovered. But the specific media dream of "people will be printing their plates at home instead of buying them in the store" was never real.
(Btw, IMO "vibe coding" is absolutely real and revolutionary, likely the biggest revolution in the software industry since, idk, the invention of the computer itself. And AI more generally is, even beyond vibe coding aspect, a revolutionary technology that will change the world in many ways.)
>> 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.
Interestingly, I am not aware that this book was really popular or well-known in Germany (I honestly hear about this specific book for the first time, though I am aware that some marketers (who in my opinion did not really understand the Maker scene or 3D printing) made such claims).
Instead, at that time, in Germany nerds were getting excited about understanding how to build 3D printers (in particular partially self-replicating ones (RepRap)) and how 3D printing
- could be used to make yourself much more independent of the discretion of part manufacturers (i.e. some part is broken? Use a CAD system to re-design it and 3D-print your re-design),
- makes you capable of building stuff in small scale "that should exist", but no manufacturer is producing,
- enables part designs that are (nearly) impossible to manufacture using any other existing technology, and thus basically enables you to completely reimagine and improve how nearly every produced part that you see around you is designed,
- ...
I would say that the mentioned nerd visions of this time have at least partially been implemented and/or are on a good way towards this goal. It's just that the practical implementations did not come with a spectacular change in the overarching mindet of society, but rather are highly important, but not (necessarily) revolutionary changes in the lifes of people who want these changes to be part of their life.
> 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.
>> 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.
Broadly true if you have $10M to throw at it, and know exactly what you want, or if what you want isn't something involving a "secret sauce".
But between competing startups doing something novel, original software is a moat. No moat is permanent; you leverage it into market share while you have time.
And no software itself is a secret, but the business logic and real-world operations it distills and caters to may be. The software is the least obfuscated part of encoding that set of operational logic, or even trade secrets, which are the DNA of a business and dictate the tools it goes into battle with.
Software being a moat (which it rarely is for long) is more of a question for the software industry. For other industries, software that amplifies best practices and crystalizes operational flow from the business logic can absolutely extend whatever moat the company already has.
In the small bore, if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested $1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.
> if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested 1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.
Counter anecdote: about a decade ago I was brought in by the new to the company director to lead the modernization of their in house Electronic Medical System software that was built on FoxPro in 1999 running with SQL Server 2000 and was maintained by two “developers” who had been their for a decade.
I led another project there first that was more pressing - in house mobile software maintained by two other “developers”. It was built on top of a mobile framework by a local startup. It was used by home health care nurses for special needs kids.
After I got my head around the business, what they were trying to do - PE owned and acquiring other companies whose systems they need to integrate and their margins were low - mostly Medicaid reimbursements - I decided the best thing I could do was put myself out of a job.
I told the director we have no business trying to build up a software development department. We moved everything to various SaaS products and paid consulting companies to make all of the customizations. Meaning they sign a statement of work and come back with a finished product.
Software development was never going to be this company’s competitive moat. They got rid of the two developers maintaining the mobile app and contracted that out. The two other developers who had maintained the FoxPro app became “data analysts” and report writers.
> 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.
The problem wouldn’t be your competitors cribbing your ideas, it would be more like letting anyone with a bone to pick audit you for minor compliance violations, customers relying on internal implementation details or judging you unfairly for legacy horrors, or devs getting self conscious about their sloppy 2am fix and prolonging an outage for rational public image/ego reasons
> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.
Personally, I don't believe the big changes will come from "coding costs less for businesses". I think it will come from "trying new businesses is now cheaper, both in time and money". Smaller and cheaper players will be entering a lot of spaces over the next 5 years IMO.
I think volume and cost was never really the issue. Even if 3D printing something was 3x the cost it could justify itself just by the sheer amount of overhead it can otherwise remove. Ultimately what limits 3D printing is what you can make with it, and the fact that it doesn't remove assembly as a manufacturing step. If you could 3D print full products then I think the promised revolution would have happened. (As it stands 3D printing has already had a massive impact on manufacturing. More stuff than you would think is 3D printed now, it's just not complete consumer items)
(Not to mention, it's only in the last few years where consumer-accessible 3D printers are more than hobbyist grade that required a huge amount of tinkering to actually work properly)
"One Print, Multiple Components: Pick & Place Tool
Some technical prints require additional components, such as magnets, threaded inserts, or bearings, to be placed during the build. Without automation, this typically means you have to pause the print and insert the part(s) by hand. Although PrusaSlicer made this process easier a while ago, The Pick & Place toolhead can do it for you, completely autonomously. This reduces manual intervention and improves placement accuracy.
We’ve co-developed the toolhead with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and it’s designed for models that combine 3D-printed models with off-the-shelf components. We’re currently targeting late 2026 with its implementation."
> Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”.
I guess the President of the United States is an almost nobody. Obama's 2013 State of the Union hyped up 3-D printing explicitly as a tech that would be bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. The U.S. government made public-private partnerships with maker spaces and fab facilities in hollowed out Rust Belt cities, and Obama mentioned it by name in the most important and viewed policy speech the President gives each year.
> “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 said. [...] 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-...)
Maybe its replacing the simplistic forms of backend web development and the keast capable frontend devs. If your job was building with DaisyUI/Tailwind you're prob replaceable by this tech. People building their first SaaS are amazed (its literally heroin for non technical idea guys). But serious engineers I know, old heads, don't seem to be that impressed and neither am I.
I don't see it competing with anyone doing anything serious, outside of ML engineers and lets be honest, they always sucked at writing code, hated writing code so its not surprising how much they sing it's praise.
> 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.
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.
I heard the CEO of Autodesk giving a talk saying that. As a stockholder, I was disappointed. Just because his daughter could make dollhouse toys with a 3D printer didn't mean it was going to take over manufacturing.
I agree with you. To me the maker movement has always been about people wanting to tinker and create things for themselves. If anything "vibe coding" makes the maker movement more accessible because people who couldn't (or didn't want to) code can try to have AI code the thing they're building.
And there are plenty of people in the maker movement who enjoy writing code, and will write it whether other people are vibe coding or not.
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 resin 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.
There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.
If you balked at the idea, then you were the bad guy, or treated with pity for being so out of touch. Usually you got the Kubler-Ross Stages thrown at you.
> There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.
Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.
The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.
Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.
>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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Vibe coding, like 3D printing, is great for little small batch runs of boutique code. Small toy apps and throwaway projects.
Vibe coding is shit for doing actual maintenance on important projects that actually run the world. It is shit for creating anything that is of robust long lasting quality. It is shit for creating code you can trust. It is shit for creating code that won’t suddenly reveal flaws and inefficiencies at scale and require an entire proper rewrite just when your product is finally gaining traction. Vibe coding has not been around long enough to make these problems obvious yet, but the time is coming. A few high profile failures will hit the media and then suddenly everyone starts coming out of the woodwork with their own vibe coding horror stories and thus the AI bubble collapse begins.
What people will eventually realize, is that if you’re building a serious business with software that must run reliably for years, it really doesn’t give you any advantage being able to vibe code something in a week vs carefully building something out over a few months. Being unable to vibe code your way out of non-trivial maintenance issues is a death sentence for your business, you will need people who know what they are doing eventually.
Relying on vibe coding causes you to have a talent debt, and though you won’t feel it when you’re first rolling out a business, eventually, the bill comes due…
The great thing about vibecoding is we're at the point where people like me have to come in to fix core problems for apps and platforms that non-domain experts are outputting as slop.
Those problems span from fundamental architecture flaws, to issues anyone who spent 5 minutes reading the docs would never do, like create an entire app that slows to a crawl when more than one user uses it, because all parallel work gets serialized due to a complete misunderstanding of how concurrency, async/await and threads work in the language they're "writing".
People with too much money build entire apps on foundations that crumble and significantly hold them back from doing simple things, and I love it.
People thought 3d printing would be democratized like the inkjet printer when it first came about. And that would be powerful because so many trips to the store would be eliminated, so many lines of business put out, so many things changed from taking all that plastic junk at walmart or spare parts for your car plus everything in between and letting you snap your fingers and having it appear in your home, in every persons home.
Seems like today they are still stuck in the tracks they were in 2016. A couple nerds own them personally. Maybe you'd find them in a maker space or a library or school. Not in your boomer parent's office though.
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...)
At some scales, Obama was right... a lot of companies that do plastic extruded parts also do 3D printing for lower volume fulfillment. You can also do some types of parts that you couldn't make through extrusion.
It's especially funny because HN commenters are some of the most likely people to make wild, sweeping claims then once they don't come true, turn back around and say "well no one was actually saying that anyway."
I also don't think the "maker movement" disappeared, it's just that the bar for making stuff is so much lower now that anyone and their grandmother can do it.
In the past weeks I:
- 3D printed custom cups that fit onto a pet feeder to prevent ants from getting to our cat food
- 3D printed custom mounts to mount 3W WS2812 LEDs to illuminate Chinese New Year lanterns and connected them to an ESP32 WLED box connected to home assistant
- Connected an vision language model to a security camera that can answer questions about how many times a cat has eaten, drank water, used the toilet, and inform us about any things in the room that look abnormal
- Custom laser cutted a wall fitting for a portable heat pump input and output condenser hoses and added a condensate pump to the contraption, it saves us $200/month in heating costs
- Custom designed a retrofit for a sliding door that accepts a Nuki smart lock that wasn't designed for this type of door.
- Custom laser cutted a valentines day card in Chinese paper cutting style that was generated with many rounds of back and forth prompting with Gemini, then converted to SVG and cut
- My wife and I thought IKEA SKADIS pegboards would look better if they were made out of bamboo plywood, so I shoved a sheet of bamboo into my laser cutter and had it cut out a pegboard that looked much nicer, sprayed it with lacquer, then attached it to the wall with 3D printed mounting hardware. The SVG for the pegboard was generated by a script written by Cursor and took a couple of minutes.
- Having an ESP32 feed a camera image to an LLM and then do something with the result is a piece of cake. A box that "sprays water to deter the cat if the cat jumps on the kitchen counter" is a 1-hour job after you order the components from Amazon, and an LLM will build that parts list for you, too.
- Reverse enginereed the firmware of a Unifi Chime to upload more chime sounds than the UI limits you to, so that I can have Unifi Protect announce if there is an intruder somewhere late at night and where. Cursor reverse-engineered the firmware .bin for me.
A lot of this could have been worth sharing 10 years ago. Now all of this is just "normal life in 2026" so you don't hear about it much. I'm used to thinking of something and then physically having it <12 hours later. It's no longer an undertaking. It's not news anymore.
The bar for "news-worthiness" for makers these days? This guy built an entire city for his cats, with a full functional subway system and everything ...
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.
We do have flying cars, and we do have printers that print other printers, but both were some combination of really expensive/poor quality. Technically speaking, if you take it that most cities have 3D printers, most cities then do have micro factories, however that says nothing about general feasability...
Technology requires infrastructure and resources, and our infrastructure is strained and our resources are even more so... Until the costs become pocket change for the average person, technology will just remain generally unavailable.
> What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"...
I don't know about the other things you mentioned, but I think you have this in the wrong category. "We were promised flying cars" is one half of a construction contrasting utopian promises/hype with dystopian (or at lest underwhelming) outcomes. I think the most common version is:
> They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
Translation: tech promised awesome things that would make our life better, but instead we actually got was stuff like the toxicity of social media.
IMHO, this insight is one of the reasons there's so much negativity around AI. People have been around the block enough to have good reason to question tech hype, and they're expecting the next thing to turn out as badly as social media did.
> 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.
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…
There are corners of the industry where people still write ASM by hand when necessary, but for the vast, vast majority it's neither necessary (because compilers are great) or worthwhile (because it's so time consuming).
Most code is written in high-level, interpreted languages with no particular attention paid to its performance characteristics. Despite the frustration of those of us who know better, businesses and users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently.
LLM output is already good enough to produce working software that meets the stated requirements. The tooling used to work with them is improving rapidly. I think we're heading towards a world where actually inspecting and understanding the code is unusual (like looking at JVM/Python bytecode is today).
Future liabilities? Not any more than we're currently producing, but produced faster.
Compilers take a formal language and translate it to another formal language. In most cases there is no ambiguity, it’s deterministic, and most importantly it’s not chaotic.
That is changing one word in the source code doesn’t tend to produce a vastly different output, or changes to completely unrelated code.
Because the LLM is working from informal language, it is by necessity making thousands of small (and not so small) decisions about how to translate the prompt into code. There are far more decisions here than can reasonably fixed in tests/specs. So any changes to the prompt/spec is likely to result in unintended changes to observable behavior that users will notice and be confused by.
You’re right that programmers regularly churn out unoptimized code. But that’s very different than churning out a bubbling morass where ever little thing that isn’t bolted down is constantly changing.
The ambiguity in translation from prompt to code means that the code is still the spec and needs to be understood. Combine that with prompt instability and we’ll be stuck understanding code for the foreseeable future.
"users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently"
When do they have a real choice, without vendor lock-in or other pressure?
Windows 11 is 4 years old but until a few months ago barely managed to overtake Windows 10. Despite upgrades that were only "by choice" in the most user hostile sense imaginable (those dark patterns were so misleading I know multiple people who didn't notice that they "agreed" to it, and as it pop ups repeatedly it only takes a single wrong click to mess up). It doesn't look like people are very excited about the "velocity".
In the gaming industry AAA titles being thrown on the market in an unfinished state tends to also not go over well with the users, but there they have more power to make a choice as the market is huge and games aren't necessary tools, and such games rarely recover after a failed launch.
If you didn't catch it, this is a joke calling out the comment above it for using a couple obvious LLM-isms. The comment above may have been a joke, too. It's hard to tell any more.
The article addresses this by making the point that prototypes != production. Arduino is great for prototyping (authors opinion; I have limited experience) but not for production-level manufacturing.
LLMs are effectively (from this article's pov) the "Arduino of coding" but due to their nature, are being misunderstood/misrepresented as production-grade code printers when really they're just glorified MVP factories.
They don't have to be used this way (I use LLMs daily to generate a ton of code, but I do it as a guided, not autonomous process which yields wildly different results than a "vibed" approach), but they are because that's the extent of most people's ability (or desire) to understand them/their role/their future beyond the consensus and hype.
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.
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.
I don't love that my career seems to be evaporating and perhaps no one will have a use for me soon, but, LLMs have made making even easier and more fun than ever. My sense of what I can take on has been amplified so much, it feels like a super power. Reverse engineering things used to be intimidating to take on, but now it feels like a couple afternoons of exploring with Claude. Understanding the scope of ideas is way more accessible, and often more constrained than it used to be.
I learn so much more than I used to, I get more done than I used to. I love it.
I am quite tired of skeptics and naysayers telling me that I'm only imagining learning, only imagining finishing projects, only imagining having more time for the fun parts.
The maker movement probably is a failure if you're an economist. Nothing could be worse for the economy than people buying less domestic products in favor making their own stuff, and sending more of their paychecks to China to get more cheap circuit boards, machines, and components.
And of course I'm not going to be setting up a "mini factory", I don't feel like it and I already got the one thing I made that I wanted, which almost certainly would never have been profitable for anyone to make at quantity in the first place. In the unlikely event someone does want one, they can just make their own following the same process as above.
If this is how an us vs them scenario is being framed, you're making a very strong case for the team I've chosen.
It sounds like you're describing winners and losers, but it's shaky ground when you realize many people simply aren't motivated to think like an economist.
Given the choice between spending my life doing interesting things and accumulating wealth, I'm quite comfortable knowing how I'll look back on things from the end.
BTW: you say "of course you're not going to be setting up a mini factory" to someone who quite literally has a mini factory in their house. I'm on Hacker News to hang out with other people who think that's awesome, not some misaligned economic philosophy.
And the entirety of OSS is hand waved away as an externality, but clearly there's something very powerful about all the sharing of models and knowledge going on that doesn't seem to be captured by traditional economic models (that I'm aware of).
I would put "you can make anything" -> "I will print guns!" strongly in the "no creative ideas" category.
Honestly, it's baffling that anyone would put real effort into printing guns when it seems as though some countries cough make it easy to pick one up at Walmart.
Of the people I know, about 80% of households have a 3D printer. Now, I'm sure I don't know that many people, but that's a lot more 3D printers than they had a decade ago.
> Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.
In my observation these news lead to maker nerds "prepper-buying" (get such a machine before they become forbidden) quite a lot of such machines recently. :-)
I disagree with your framing cynicism as an "agenda". For the record, I agree that the maker movement hasn't actually ended, and most of your points are correct; however, the idea of LLMs teaching Electronics worries me about as much as people using LLMs to learn Chemistry.
A little while ago I had to dissuade someone from learning Chemistry via an LLM, because the advice that they had been given by the LLM would have very literally either blown up the glassware, throwing molten chemicals all over their clothing, or killed them when they tried to taste whatever they were trying to synthesize. There was no consideration of safety protocol, PPE, proper glassware, or correctly dealing with chemical reactions, and nary a mention of a fucking fume hood. NileRed and a few other chemistry youtubers have utterly woeful approaches to laboratory safety (NileRed specifically I have a chip on my shoulder about — I've seen him practice bad lab work on a number of occasions and violate many of the common safety practices from e.g. Vogel's), but even then they do still take precautions! Let it not be forgotten that safety practices are born through bloodshed. Now we have a whole new wave of people who are excited to learn, and that's great, but one stray hallucination will kill them. I'm sure that the LLM will be more than happy to write an "Oh I'm sorry, it's my bad that I forgot to tell you to double glove when handling organic mercury!" but by then it is too late.
The idea of someone learning, say, House DIY from an LLM and then sawing through the joists or rewiring their electronics is utterly terrifying to me, quite frankly. Likewise, the idea of someone following an LLM's instructions and then blowing themselves up in a shower of capacitors or chemical glassware is also utterly terrifying to me.
Yes, you could do all these things before. But at least the most commonly available learning materials to you were trustworthy and written by experts!
I guess we have to agree to disagree, because I am not particularly interested in chemistry and ChatGPT has been extraordinarily helpful in demystifying electronics. Having 24/7 access to a patient person who can unpack the difference between TTL and CMOS logic or when you'd choose a buffer instead of a Schmitt trigger without belittling you for not already knowing what they know is awesome and not going to get anyone even slightly killed.
> The idea of someone learning, say, House DIY from an LLM and then sawing through the joists or rewiring their electronics is utterly terrifying to me, quite frankly.
Can't wait for the load-bearing drywall recommendations coming from LLMs that were trained on years of Groverhaus content.
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.
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.
Every market on some level can be analogized to a common and simple market.
One of the common examples in management books is the signage industry. You can have custom logos custom molded, extruded, embossed, carved, or at least printed onto a large, professional-looking billboard or marquee size sign. You can have a video billboard. You can have a vacuum formed plastic sign rotating on top of a pole. At the end of the day, though, your barrier to entry is a teenager with a piece of posterboard and some felt-tipped markers.
What has happened is that as the coding part has become easier, the barrier to entry has lowered. There are still parts of the market for the bespoke code running in as little memory and as few CPU cycles as possible, with the QA needed for life-critical reliability. There’s business-critical code. There’s code reliable enough for amusement. But the bottom of the market keeps moving lower. As that happens, people with less skill and less dedication can make something temporary or utilitarian, but it’s not going to compete where people have the budget to do it the higher-quality way.
How much an LLM or any other sort of agent helps at the higher ends of the market is the only open question. The bottom of the market will almost certainly be coded with very little skilled human input.
There's definitely a trend towards flashy projects prioritizing style over substance, which can overshadow more practical applications. It's easy to get caught up in the hype and overlook the real problems that need solving.
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.
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.
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.
The commercialization is still ongoing, though the market is small enough it's been a struggle for any company pushing towards proprietary solutions and ecosystems to capture the whole market.
Which as you say, is a good thing. I still fear what will happen if 3D printing commoditizes into a similar structure as 2D printing.
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.
I saw that happen in a decent sized college town near where I live. They had a maker space spring up when 3D printing was the hottest thing. It didn't last very long though. I'm a bit surprised that 3D printer machines haven't become cheaper. Like solid machines sub-$100. 3D printer pens are the only thing that came close to doing that.
I'm not trying to defend maker spaces, though they make more sense to me in a college setting. My college had (has?) one and one of our professors really made sure to always use it, and have students use it and learn. Immense value there, even if only a dozen or less use it every year, its still an avenue for inspiration.
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.
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.
I think the severity of this is wildly overblown in an effort to make it fit the thesis.
Like… if the maker thing was less of an insane cult that died out than genuine excitement about things that actually did matter… well the whole thing falls apart.
We’re just not required to accept the (false, I think) premise this depends on, even if we’re inclined to agree with what it says about vibecoding.
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
The hype cycle of 3D printers has probably plateaued into productivity now. Certainly the Maker movement is alive and well but it's not the hot new thing like it was a decade or a dozen years ago. Makerspaces aren't sprouting like mushrooms like they were before (partly because critical mass was already reached, partly because the pandemic reduction of physicality I'd guess), you don't see gimmicky 3D-printing kiosks at the mall anymore.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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?
It's really not bad quality. The code written by AI is pretty decent now and fixing it is easy too. There are people making poor decisions with the technology (like OpenClaw); that doesn't make the technology bad.
With AI you can build tools fast. You can then version and release those tools, and improve them, fast. Then the AI can use that version of that tool. This gives the AI a fixed set of deterministic functionality that works the same way every time.
The CSO that had all their mail deleted happened because the tools they have right now aren't very good. Whatever that mail tool was, could be easily modified to have a limiter added that stops attempts to mass-delete emails. Hell, your own email client already will prompt you to confirm if you really want to "delete all emails" - because humans are stupid, like AI, and make mistakes, like AI. They just have to build the guardrails in, rather than hoping and praying that the AI will "behave itself". If the AI is a monkey at a joystick, we still control all the machinery attached to the joystick.
Readit News
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.
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.
No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.
Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.
I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.
I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.
I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.
It feels different now.
I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.
I'm honestly just happy at the moment, because our two junior admins/platform engineers have made some really good points to me in preparation for their annual reviews.
One now completed his own bigger terraform project, with the great praise of "That looks super easy to maintain and use" from the other more experienced engineers. He figured: "It's weird, you actually end up thinking and poking at a problem for a week or two, and then it actually folds into a very small amount of code. And sure, Copilot helped a bit with some boilerplate, but that was only after figuring out how to structure and hold it".
The other is working on getting a grip on running the big temperamental beast called PostgreSQL. She was recently a bit frustrated. "How can it be so hard to configure a simple number! It's so easy to set it in ansible and roll it out, but to find the right value, you gotta search the entire universe from top to bottom and then the answer is <maybe>. AAaah I gotta yell at a team". She's on a good way to become a great DBA.
> 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.
Or if it's very structured and testable. For example, we're seeing great value in rebuilding a Grafana instance from manually managed to scripted dashboards. After a bit of scaffolding, some style instructions and a few example systems, you can just chuck it a description and a few queries, it just goes to successful work and just needs a little tweaking afterwards.
Similar, we're now converting a few remnants of our old config management to the new one using AI agents. Setup a good test suite first, then throw old code and examples of how the new config management does it into the context and modern models do that well. At that point, just rebuilding the system once is better than year-long deprecation plans with undecided stakeholders as mobile as a pet ferret that doesn't want to.
It's really not the code holding the platform together, it's the team and the experiences and behaviors of people.
Looks at the scores of Ycombinator startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and failed. Good ideas, pretty websites, but not a lot of substance under the hood. The VC gathering aspect and online kudos was way more important to them than actually producing good code and a reliable product that would stand the test of time.
Pretty much the most detestable section of the HN community. IMNHSO. I notice they're much quieter than usual since the whole vibe coding thing kicked off.
They were only as good as the input they were given. They rarely went above and beyond, and most of the time getting something "good enough" was challenging. Yes, time zones, cultural differences/attitudes, and their exposure/opportunities play a big role.
What I'm saying is that teams who had bad onshore employees got horrible results. Teams that had actual systems engineers and people who could architect systems usually got great results.
For example, we were building a bleeding edge (at the time) e commerce site for one of the largest companies in the entertainment space. I made sure to work with the best people I knew at the company to design the system from the ground up. Then, we made sure the actual "functional" pieces were digestible and written plainly that we didn't need to clarify words. Nor did we write a fucking 300 page technical document. We kept things simple and effective, and all the work was broken down into as atomic pieces as possible.
The end result was that we used a team distributed between Ukraine and India to build this in about 4 months. We'd do weekly sprints, and the team had great spirits too because we actually gave a fuck about them and ensuring their success. I'm sure they're used to being scapegoats because of some lazy fucks onshore.
Now I use agents daily and have great success. However, the whole "write a sentence and AI will do it for you" is obviously bullshit. I even asked HN why I got wrong results to test what people would respond (sorry for playing you) and as I predicted they blamed me thus proving that this broader sentiment that's so prominent by "thought leaders" is stupid as fuck. So, that's where we are.
People who can actually build great systems know that it requires careful planning, deep understanding, and ability to fill in the gaps.
I mean, rename some dudes over there to ‘transformer’, and let them copy & paste from GitHub with abandon… I know we could get a whole browser for less than a few grand.
We wouldn’t, because it’d be copyright-insane. But if we just got it indirect enough, maybe fed the info to the copiers through a ‘transforming’ browser to mirror the copyright argument, I bet we could outperform OpenAI in key metrics.
Coding is formalizing for the compiler. The other 99% of the job is softly getting the PHB not to fuck the entire company and being unique in not doing dumb shit everyone thinks is popular now but will regret soon. It’s all like IT tribal tattoos. Barely cool for a couple of years, and then a lifelong source of shielded regret.
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.
If there is any commonality between the 3D printing craze and vibe-coding, they're both renditions of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
But the real magic happens in CAD while printers are good enough that it gets out of your way.
It's no replicator, but give it 5 years and it might be surprising how useful it is.
Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.
Certainly there’s utility in the technology, and much moreso if you’re making aircraft parts. And I love prototyping with my various machines.
But I agree, it has had far more than its fair share of hype at the home printer level.
They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.
Which apes vibecoding. ChatGPT 3.5 was laughably bad compared to codex 5.3, but if you're basing your opinion on 3.5's performance, your opinion's out of date.
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"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...
No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.
Print quality is everything when it comes to 3D printing. The printing quality must keep increasing if 3D prints are to be used as finished products. People should stop printing STL artifacts into their prints. Layer lines must fade away into invisibility. Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping. New coatings need to be developed for texturing 3d printed parts and the parts need to be ready for coating right from the print bed.
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.
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%.
It absolutely was the "promise" the media spun.
I had the relatively unique experience of moving from being an outsider to this field to being an insider. While I was an outsider, my impressions, formed by the media, was exactly that—3d printing would be the next big revolution, in a few years there'd be a printer in every home, etc.
I then joined a company that allocated a lot of resources to 3d printing. It only took me a month or two to realize that the big media claims were absolutely ridiculous, and didn't make any sense as stated. They misunderstood the state of the technology, and misunderstood basic economics and how regular manufacturing works.
That's not to say there's no value in 3d printing or the maker movement. There's a ton of value that's been uncovered. But the specific media dream of "people will be printing their plates at home instead of buying them in the store" was never real.
(Btw, IMO "vibe coding" is absolutely real and revolutionary, likely the biggest revolution in the software industry since, idk, the invention of the computer itself. And AI more generally is, even beyond vibe coding aspect, a revolutionary technology that will change the world in many ways.)
> never heard that.
This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution") https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...
Interestingly, I am not aware that this book was really popular or well-known in Germany (I honestly hear about this specific book for the first time, though I am aware that some marketers (who in my opinion did not really understand the Maker scene or 3D printing) made such claims).
Instead, at that time, in Germany nerds were getting excited about understanding how to build 3D printers (in particular partially self-replicating ones (RepRap)) and how 3D printing
- could be used to make yourself much more independent of the discretion of part manufacturers (i.e. some part is broken? Use a CAD system to re-design it and 3D-print your re-design),
- makes you capable of building stuff in small scale "that should exist", but no manufacturer is producing,
- enables part designs that are (nearly) impossible to manufacture using any other existing technology, and thus basically enables you to completely reimagine and improve how nearly every produced part that you see around you is designed,
- ...
I would say that the mentioned nerd visions of this time have at least partially been implemented and/or are on a good way towards this goal. It's just that the practical implementations did not come with a spectacular change in the overarching mindet of society, but rather are highly important, but not (necessarily) revolutionary changes in the lifes of people who want these changes to be part of their life.
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.
Broadly true if you have $10M to throw at it, and know exactly what you want, or if what you want isn't something involving a "secret sauce".
But between competing startups doing something novel, original software is a moat. No moat is permanent; you leverage it into market share while you have time.
And no software itself is a secret, but the business logic and real-world operations it distills and caters to may be. The software is the least obfuscated part of encoding that set of operational logic, or even trade secrets, which are the DNA of a business and dictate the tools it goes into battle with.
Software being a moat (which it rarely is for long) is more of a question for the software industry. For other industries, software that amplifies best practices and crystalizes operational flow from the business logic can absolutely extend whatever moat the company already has.
In the small bore, if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested $1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.
Counter anecdote: about a decade ago I was brought in by the new to the company director to lead the modernization of their in house Electronic Medical System software that was built on FoxPro in 1999 running with SQL Server 2000 and was maintained by two “developers” who had been their for a decade.
I led another project there first that was more pressing - in house mobile software maintained by two other “developers”. It was built on top of a mobile framework by a local startup. It was used by home health care nurses for special needs kids.
After I got my head around the business, what they were trying to do - PE owned and acquiring other companies whose systems they need to integrate and their margins were low - mostly Medicaid reimbursements - I decided the best thing I could do was put myself out of a job.
I told the director we have no business trying to build up a software development department. We moved everything to various SaaS products and paid consulting companies to make all of the customizations. Meaning they sign a statement of work and come back with a finished product.
Software development was never going to be this company’s competitive moat. They got rid of the two developers maintaining the mobile app and contracted that out. The two other developers who had maintained the FoxPro app became “data analysts” and report writers.
Every company does need to know its numbers
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.
Personally, I don't believe the big changes will come from "coding costs less for businesses". I think it will come from "trying new businesses is now cheaper, both in time and money". Smaller and cheaper players will be entering a lot of spaces over the next 5 years IMO.
(Not to mention, it's only in the last few years where consumer-accessible 3D printers are more than hobbyist grade that required a huge amount of tinkering to actually work properly)
Prusa is working on a Pick & Place Toolhead for the Prusa XL to enable at least some very specific assembly steps to be done on this 3D printer:
> https://blog.prusa3d.com/xl-in-2026-new-toolheads-lower-pric...
"One Print, Multiple Components: Pick & Place Tool
Some technical prints require additional components, such as magnets, threaded inserts, or bearings, to be placed during the build. Without automation, this typically means you have to pause the print and insert the part(s) by hand. Although PrusaSlicer made this process easier a while ago, The Pick & Place toolhead can do it for you, completely autonomously. This reduces manual intervention and improves placement accuracy.
We’ve co-developed the toolhead with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and it’s designed for models that combine 3D-printed models with off-the-shelf components. We’re currently targeting late 2026 with its implementation."
Its also interesting how the author frames the results: Shenzhen is now better than it was ever before at manufacturing. The maker culture succeeded!
I guess the President of the United States is an almost nobody. Obama's 2013 State of the Union hyped up 3-D printing explicitly as a tech that would be bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. The U.S. government made public-private partnerships with maker spaces and fab facilities in hollowed out Rust Belt cities, and Obama mentioned it by name in the most important and viewed policy speech the President gives each year.
> “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 said. [...] 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-...)
I don't see it competing with anyone doing anything serious, outside of ML engineers and lets be honest, they always sucked at writing code, hated writing code so its not surprising how much they sing it's praise.
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.
And there are plenty of people in the maker movement who enjoy writing code, and will write it whether other people are vibe coding or not.
it's the people that sell the pickaxe pickaxes.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/trump-canada-yukon-1.3235254
If you balked at the idea, then you were the bad guy, or treated with pity for being so out of touch. Usually you got the Kubler-Ross Stages thrown at you.
Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.
The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.
Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.
Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?
It seems like a lot of vibe coders are people who otherwise wouldn't be coding at all.
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.
Vibe coding, like 3D printing, is great for little small batch runs of boutique code. Small toy apps and throwaway projects.
Vibe coding is shit for doing actual maintenance on important projects that actually run the world. It is shit for creating anything that is of robust long lasting quality. It is shit for creating code you can trust. It is shit for creating code that won’t suddenly reveal flaws and inefficiencies at scale and require an entire proper rewrite just when your product is finally gaining traction. Vibe coding has not been around long enough to make these problems obvious yet, but the time is coming. A few high profile failures will hit the media and then suddenly everyone starts coming out of the woodwork with their own vibe coding horror stories and thus the AI bubble collapse begins.
What people will eventually realize, is that if you’re building a serious business with software that must run reliably for years, it really doesn’t give you any advantage being able to vibe code something in a week vs carefully building something out over a few months. Being unable to vibe code your way out of non-trivial maintenance issues is a death sentence for your business, you will need people who know what they are doing eventually.
Relying on vibe coding causes you to have a talent debt, and though you won’t feel it when you’re first rolling out a business, eventually, the bill comes due…
To the realists, 3D printing is specifically for small-scale manufacturing, rapid iteration on prototypes, etc.
Those problems span from fundamental architecture flaws, to issues anyone who spent 5 minutes reading the docs would never do, like create an entire app that slows to a crawl when more than one user uses it, because all parallel work gets serialized due to a complete misunderstanding of how concurrency, async/await and threads work in the language they're "writing".
People with too much money build entire apps on foundations that crumble and significantly hold them back from doing simple things, and I love it.
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Seems like today they are still stuck in the tracks they were in 2016. A couple nerds own them personally. Maybe you'd find them in a maker space or a library or school. Not in your boomer parent's office though.
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...)
In the past weeks I:
- 3D printed custom cups that fit onto a pet feeder to prevent ants from getting to our cat food
- 3D printed custom mounts to mount 3W WS2812 LEDs to illuminate Chinese New Year lanterns and connected them to an ESP32 WLED box connected to home assistant
- Connected an vision language model to a security camera that can answer questions about how many times a cat has eaten, drank water, used the toilet, and inform us about any things in the room that look abnormal
- Custom laser cutted a wall fitting for a portable heat pump input and output condenser hoses and added a condensate pump to the contraption, it saves us $200/month in heating costs
- Custom designed a retrofit for a sliding door that accepts a Nuki smart lock that wasn't designed for this type of door.
- Custom laser cutted a valentines day card in Chinese paper cutting style that was generated with many rounds of back and forth prompting with Gemini, then converted to SVG and cut
- My wife and I thought IKEA SKADIS pegboards would look better if they were made out of bamboo plywood, so I shoved a sheet of bamboo into my laser cutter and had it cut out a pegboard that looked much nicer, sprayed it with lacquer, then attached it to the wall with 3D printed mounting hardware. The SVG for the pegboard was generated by a script written by Cursor and took a couple of minutes.
- Having an ESP32 feed a camera image to an LLM and then do something with the result is a piece of cake. A box that "sprays water to deter the cat if the cat jumps on the kitchen counter" is a 1-hour job after you order the components from Amazon, and an LLM will build that parts list for you, too.
- Reverse enginereed the firmware of a Unifi Chime to upload more chime sounds than the UI limits you to, so that I can have Unifi Protect announce if there is an intruder somewhere late at night and where. Cursor reverse-engineered the firmware .bin for me.
A lot of this could have been worth sharing 10 years ago. Now all of this is just "normal life in 2026" so you don't hear about it much. I'm used to thinking of something and then physically having it <12 hours later. It's no longer an undertaking. It's not news anymore.
The bar for "news-worthiness" for makers these days? This guy built an entire city for his cats, with a full functional subway system and everything ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4UEugp_mf0
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law
We do have flying cars, and we do have printers that print other printers, but both were some combination of really expensive/poor quality. Technically speaking, if you take it that most cities have 3D printers, most cities then do have micro factories, however that says nothing about general feasability...
Technology requires infrastructure and resources, and our infrastructure is strained and our resources are even more so... Until the costs become pocket change for the average person, technology will just remain generally unavailable.
I don't know about the other things you mentioned, but I think you have this in the wrong category. "We were promised flying cars" is one half of a construction contrasting utopian promises/hype with dystopian (or at lest underwhelming) outcomes. I think the most common version is:
> They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
Translation: tech promised awesome things that would make our life better, but instead we actually got was stuff like the toxicity of social media.
IMHO, this insight is one of the reasons there's so much negativity around AI. People have been around the block enough to have good reason to question tech hype, and they're expecting the next thing to turn out as badly as social media did.
This promise did get fulfilled: helicopters do exist.
The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
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…
There are corners of the industry where people still write ASM by hand when necessary, but for the vast, vast majority it's neither necessary (because compilers are great) or worthwhile (because it's so time consuming).
Most code is written in high-level, interpreted languages with no particular attention paid to its performance characteristics. Despite the frustration of those of us who know better, businesses and users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently.
LLM output is already good enough to produce working software that meets the stated requirements. The tooling used to work with them is improving rapidly. I think we're heading towards a world where actually inspecting and understanding the code is unusual (like looking at JVM/Python bytecode is today).
Future liabilities? Not any more than we're currently producing, but produced faster.
That is changing one word in the source code doesn’t tend to produce a vastly different output, or changes to completely unrelated code.
Because the LLM is working from informal language, it is by necessity making thousands of small (and not so small) decisions about how to translate the prompt into code. There are far more decisions here than can reasonably fixed in tests/specs. So any changes to the prompt/spec is likely to result in unintended changes to observable behavior that users will notice and be confused by.
You’re right that programmers regularly churn out unoptimized code. But that’s very different than churning out a bubbling morass where ever little thing that isn’t bolted down is constantly changing.
The ambiguity in translation from prompt to code means that the code is still the spec and needs to be understood. Combine that with prompt instability and we’ll be stuck understanding code for the foreseeable future.
When do they have a real choice, without vendor lock-in or other pressure?
Windows 11 is 4 years old but until a few months ago barely managed to overtake Windows 10. Despite upgrades that were only "by choice" in the most user hostile sense imaginable (those dark patterns were so misleading I know multiple people who didn't notice that they "agreed" to it, and as it pop ups repeatedly it only takes a single wrong click to mess up). It doesn't look like people are very excited about the "velocity".
In the gaming industry AAA titles being thrown on the market in an unfinished state tends to also not go over well with the users, but there they have more power to make a choice as the market is huge and games aren't necessary tools, and such games rarely recover after a failed launch.
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LLMs are effectively (from this article's pov) the "Arduino of coding" but due to their nature, are being misunderstood/misrepresented as production-grade code printers when really they're just glorified MVP factories.
They don't have to be used this way (I use LLMs daily to generate a ton of code, but I do it as a guided, not autonomous process which yields wildly different results than a "vibed" approach), but they are because that's the extent of most people's ability (or desire) to understand them/their role/their future beyond the consensus and hype.
https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2
This is such high minded bullshit.
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
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.
I don't love that my career seems to be evaporating and perhaps no one will have a use for me soon, but, LLMs have made making even easier and more fun than ever. My sense of what I can take on has been amplified so much, it feels like a super power. Reverse engineering things used to be intimidating to take on, but now it feels like a couple afternoons of exploring with Claude. Understanding the scope of ideas is way more accessible, and often more constrained than it used to be.
I learn so much more than I used to, I get more done than I used to. I love it.
I am quite tired of skeptics and naysayers telling me that I'm only imagining learning, only imagining finishing projects, only imagining having more time for the fun parts.
And for the most part they just aren't
Either way, I suppose the answer is relative and subjective and Bambu Lab would not agree with you.
And of course I'm not going to be setting up a "mini factory", I don't feel like it and I already got the one thing I made that I wanted, which almost certainly would never have been profitable for anyone to make at quantity in the first place. In the unlikely event someone does want one, they can just make their own following the same process as above.
It sounds like you're describing winners and losers, but it's shaky ground when you realize many people simply aren't motivated to think like an economist.
Given the choice between spending my life doing interesting things and accumulating wealth, I'm quite comfortable knowing how I'll look back on things from the end.
BTW: you say "of course you're not going to be setting up a mini factory" to someone who quite literally has a mini factory in their house. I'm on Hacker News to hang out with other people who think that's awesome, not some misaligned economic philosophy.
Do a lot of people do it? Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.
Honestly, it's baffling that anyone would put real effort into printing guns when it seems as though some countries cough make it easy to pick one up at Walmart.
In my observation these news lead to maker nerds "prepper-buying" (get such a machine before they become forbidden) quite a lot of such machines recently. :-)
A little while ago I had to dissuade someone from learning Chemistry via an LLM, because the advice that they had been given by the LLM would have very literally either blown up the glassware, throwing molten chemicals all over their clothing, or killed them when they tried to taste whatever they were trying to synthesize. There was no consideration of safety protocol, PPE, proper glassware, or correctly dealing with chemical reactions, and nary a mention of a fucking fume hood. NileRed and a few other chemistry youtubers have utterly woeful approaches to laboratory safety (NileRed specifically I have a chip on my shoulder about — I've seen him practice bad lab work on a number of occasions and violate many of the common safety practices from e.g. Vogel's), but even then they do still take precautions! Let it not be forgotten that safety practices are born through bloodshed. Now we have a whole new wave of people who are excited to learn, and that's great, but one stray hallucination will kill them. I'm sure that the LLM will be more than happy to write an "Oh I'm sorry, it's my bad that I forgot to tell you to double glove when handling organic mercury!" but by then it is too late.
The idea of someone learning, say, House DIY from an LLM and then sawing through the joists or rewiring their electronics is utterly terrifying to me, quite frankly. Likewise, the idea of someone following an LLM's instructions and then blowing themselves up in a shower of capacitors or chemical glassware is also utterly terrifying to me.
Yes, you could do all these things before. But at least the most commonly available learning materials to you were trustworthy and written by experts!
Can't wait for the load-bearing drywall recommendations coming from LLMs that were trained on years of Groverhaus content.
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.
One of the common examples in management books is the signage industry. You can have custom logos custom molded, extruded, embossed, carved, or at least printed onto a large, professional-looking billboard or marquee size sign. You can have a video billboard. You can have a vacuum formed plastic sign rotating on top of a pole. At the end of the day, though, your barrier to entry is a teenager with a piece of posterboard and some felt-tipped markers.
What has happened is that as the coding part has become easier, the barrier to entry has lowered. There are still parts of the market for the bespoke code running in as little memory and as few CPU cycles as possible, with the QA needed for life-critical reliability. There’s business-critical code. There’s code reliable enough for amusement. But the bottom of the market keeps moving lower. As that happens, people with less skill and less dedication can make something temporary or utilitarian, but it’s not going to compete where people have the budget to do it the higher-quality way.
How much an LLM or any other sort of agent helps at the higher ends of the market is the only open question. The bottom of the market will almost certainly be coded with very little skilled human input.
There are many people who code to make cool stuff and enjoy sharing, but there is even more people who code to look good on CV.
I’m not trying to be mean, this is just an anecdote I had from my time hiring.
JB: Yeah but guess who did write it, me!
KG: Yeah but did you write this?
JB: Dude, I did, I told you to do the bendy every once in a while!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLvOLjHt4S0
[Edit: no need for the downvote, folks, it was an honest question although it seemed otherwise. I think the answers below make sense.]
Which as you say, is a good thing. I still fear what will happen if 3D printing commoditizes into a similar structure as 2D printing.
Bump.
Because we had our first high profile murder using a 3d printed weapon just last year.
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.
Curious how this differed in northern Europe where Sloyd Woodworking has a long tradition in early education:
https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
What has changed is that the fusion of the more artistic end of model making and woodwork is less lumped together with electronics and 3d printing.
I would say that there are much more makers, but they are more specialised.
Like… if the maker thing was less of an insane cult that died out than genuine excitement about things that actually did matter… well the whole thing falls apart.
We’re just not required to accept the (false, I think) premise this depends on, even if we’re inclined to agree with what it says about vibecoding.
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
And mastering a technology has lost its point.
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.
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.
With AI you can build tools fast. You can then version and release those tools, and improve them, fast. Then the AI can use that version of that tool. This gives the AI a fixed set of deterministic functionality that works the same way every time.
The CSO that had all their mail deleted happened because the tools they have right now aren't very good. Whatever that mail tool was, could be easily modified to have a limiter added that stops attempts to mass-delete emails. Hell, your own email client already will prompt you to confirm if you really want to "delete all emails" - because humans are stupid, like AI, and make mistakes, like AI. They just have to build the guardrails in, rather than hoping and praying that the AI will "behave itself". If the AI is a monkey at a joystick, we still control all the machinery attached to the joystick.