Having had a subscription to Hack-a-Day for a long time, I firmly believe that the vast majority of "weird one-off" Raspberry Pi projects don't actually need anything as capable as a Raspberry Pi SBC. It's just a matter of brand recognition and familiarity. If it gets too expensive, I suspect that more users will migrate to microcontrollers than to gutted notebooks.

You don't even need to learn anything new, I'm sure you can ask Claude to vibe code something on RP2350 nowadays and there's an 80% chance it will work.

A lot of things wouldn't even need a RP2350. The original Arduino alone was pretty slick for a lot of cool small scale projects.

I built a portable meshtastic terminal using Claude and a Pico 2. It's written 100% of the code in MicroPython and it works great. It even wrote the driver for the E-ink screen I'm using. I built a jig to hold a webcam and the e-ink screen, then had Claude write a script/MCP that takes a photo and crops just the screen out. Then I asked it to figure out a driver, and after a 20 minute loop of taking photos and updating it's driver, it was done.

Another Hackaday reader here. I think that the RPi shines in projects where GPIO are needed, yet the developer needs a full Linux OS (usually to run Python).

I agree that vibe coding microcontrollers will increase the use of embedded systems instead of RPi devices. Seems like a good move for them to have built the RPi Pico.