> 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.