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.

> 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.

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

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

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

The title of the linked article is "Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement" but the title on Hacker News is "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?" - I think the original title should be restored.

The maker movement is not dead but it's a far more niche audience. Don't get me wrong, get a 3d printer and an arduino(or arduino like equivalent), endure a week of suffering and you are hooked for life: this was my own experience and anyone that I know that has ever gone down that road. ~~vibe~~ Slop coding won't die either but there a lot of people will get a cold shower sooner or later: some already have. All ai slop is a russian roulette where the players may not even know they are playing and the gun is a backwards revolver. I can't say whether slop coding will professionally die before or after the burst of the AI bubble, but everyone is starting to realize that slop is unmaintainable, inefficient and full of bugs when you factor in all the edge cases no slop machine will ever cover. AI can exist in non-professional spaces and hobby projects, though I'd argue it may be equally as dangerous for the people that use it and those around them: you are only one firewall-cmd away from leaking all your personal data.

As for the parallels with the maker movements, here's one example: drones are one of my hobbies. I love drones and I've built countless fpv ones. For anyone that hasn't done that, the main thing to know is that no two self-build drones are the same - custom 3d printed parts, tweaks, tons of fiddling about. The main difference is that while I am self-taught when it comes to drones, I have some decent knowledge in physics, I understand the implications of building a drone and what could go wrong: you won't see me flying any of my drones in the city - you may find me in some remote, secluded area, sure. The point is I am taking precautions to make sure that when I eventually crash my drone(not IF but WHEN), it will be in a tree 10km from anything that breathes. Slop code is something you live with and there are infinite ways to f-up. And way too many people are living in denial about it.

Wait - the maker movement ended?

These promotional articles get more refined: They start with the negatives and then refute them in the last paragraphs.

None of these sophisticated articles mention that you could already steal open source with the press of a button before LLMs. The theft has just been automated with what vibe coders think is plausible deniability.

If you're vibecoding the start of the singularity... then may be yes.

My general take on most vibe coding projects ("Hey, look, I built this over the weekend"), is general dismissiveness. Mostly because of the effort required, i.e. why should I care about something that someone did with almost zero effort, a few prompts?

If someone tells me they ran a marathon, I'm impressed because I know that took work. If someone tells me they jogged 100 meters, I don't care at all (unless they were previously crippled or morbidly obese etc.).

I think there are just a ton of none-engineers who are super hyped right now that they built something/anything, but don't have any internal benchmark or calibration about what is actually "good" or "impressive" when it comes to software, since they never built anything before, with AI or otherwise.

Even roughly a year ago, I made a 3D shooting game over an evening using Claude and never bothered sharing it because it seemed like pure slop and far too easy to brag about. Now my bar for being "impressed" by software is incredibly high, knowing you can few shot almost anything imaginable in a few hours.

A mix of perspectives in here that feel inter-related. The maker movement state-side leaned more "fun or artsy" while the real maker movement you could argue was thriving in China. Another darker way of looking at it is: if the maker movement was really believed to be a way to bring manufacturing back, it was effectively cargo-culting that by focusing only on a narrow set of building blocks. Maybe it's similar to building your own PC from parts at Fry's back at the day: that felt good... and you did feel you were really making something. But you were really doing final assembly and abstracting out the complexity of building those building blocks that went into it.

Anyway I think we are seeing a scenius phase -- it's just happening everywhere all at once on a world stage. And it's exciting. As with any moment in time there's a ton of experimentation and a small number of break-out hits. Also the pace of change means there's less staying power for a break-out hit than there used to be.

But the quick break-out hit phenomenon is particularly applicable for things that are more about the attention economy and less about the boring hidden things that traditionally have been where the economy's silent toil is really centered.

All of this makes me feel the author is too close to the creative end-consumer layer e.g. "make something flashy and cool whether it's a 3d-printer in a 5th avenue dept. store window, or a new app front end" but perhaps less focused on the full depth of things that really exist around them.

This really resonates with me in that a lot of NYC's "tech" circa 2013 was 3d printing oriented, much more so than in Silicon Valley. And I wondered why? but then it was a reflection that tech in NYC then was more about marketing, story telling, and less about the depth...

Obviously you had the west coast makers, you had the burners, so I don't mean to conflate all these differnet things. But the idea that Maker Faires were really about bringing manufacturing back... I don't know I think it was more about the counterculture, about having fun. I think that's coming back to tech right now as well in a sense. Even if it's also got dystopian overtones

TL;DR

Quick answer: No. Long answer: its the opposite; as an example, can use claude code to generate, build and debug ESP32 code for a given purpose; suddenly everyone can build smart gizmos without having to learn c/c++ and having knowledge of a ton of libraries.