Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

Hacker News · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Whenever a new technology arrives, the impulse is to treat it as something that has never existed before. A clean break from everything that came prior. I catch myself doing this with vibe coding constantly, and I see it everywhere around me. But the most useful lens for understanding a new phenomenon is almost never the phenomenon itself. You want something adjacent, close enough to share structural similarities but removed enough to see clearly. It’s on the lookout for something like this that I started reading more about the Maker Movement of ~2005-2015.The Maker Movement was the spiritual predecessor to vibe coding. The parallels are hard to miss. Vibe coding has slop. The Maker Movement had crapjects, a term the community coined for 3D-printed objects that served no purpose beyond proving you could extrude plastic into a shape. The Claude Code of that era was a $200 printer from Monoprice and a breadboard.The scene around making produced what were probably the first internet-native network intellectuals. Chris Anderson (who wrote the widely-read piece about the long tail) left his editor-in-chief role at Wired to start a robotics company called 3D Robotics. Cory Doctorow wrote Makers, a sci-fi novel based around characters who are hacking hardware and business models to survive in a world where everything is falling apart. These were people who gained influence by participating visibly in a making culture and writing about what it meant.A lot of the intellectual energy of the AI era orbits around AGI: when it arrives, what it’ll do to jobs, whether it will be aligned. The Maker Movement had its own gravitational center, and it was the idea that making physical things with your hands could produce an internal transformation. You would become more creative, more entrepreneurial, more self-reliant. The object you made mattered less than what the act of making did to you.In 2018, the media scholar Fred Turner published a paper that put this ideology under a microscope. His argument was that the Maker Movement had reinvented the theology of the Western Frontier for the digital age.The specifics of seventeenth-century Puritanism are obviously gone. Nobody at a Maker Faire was talking about predestination. But Turner traced the literary forms and the millenarian structure—the belief that a great transformation is coming, and that individual discipline will determine who makes it through. In the Maker narrative, the American landscape is economically barren. Jobs have disappeared. Institutions have failed you. And in this wilderness, the lone individual searches inside themselves for signs of the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative spark, evidence that they are among the elect who will build their way to salvation.Turner’s observation extends well beyond 3D printers. You can trace this same pattern through almost every hobbyist technology scene of the past fifty years. Homebrew computer clubs in the 1970s. Punk zines in the 1980s. The early web in the 1990s. Each one developed a community of practice—what Brian Eno would call a “scenius”—where people played with tools that the mainstream considered toys. Each one generated its own salvation narrative: master this tool, transform yourself, become the kind of person who builds the future.And each one operated with a useful kind of slack. The tools were unproductive on purpose. Nobody expected your Arduino project to ship to customers. Nobody expected your homebrew computer to compete with IBM. The whole point was that you had permission to fuck around, and the finding-out happened gradually, through play, over years. This is where the old Silicon Valley adage comes from: “What smart people do on the weekends, everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”Vibe coding broke this pattern in a way that matters.Every previous wave of hobbyist technology went through a scenius phase—a period where small groups of weirdos played with tools before anyone expected economic output from them.Vibe coding skipped that phase entirely. It was deployed directly to the general public, and almost immediately into the codebases of enterprise companies and well-developed products. There was no protected playground period. There was no time to accumulate the weird, useless, playful knowledge that scenius communities generate. Instead, there was immediate pressure to one-shot yourself into a hit product or solve a complex use case on the first try.This matters because the scenius phase is where the internal transformation actually happens. 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. When I speak with people who are on Claude Code 12-14 hours a day, I feel like I’m speaking to someone possessed by something, attempting to grasp a different reality. In the case of scenius, the feedback loop that tethers you to reality was provided by other humans. Someone looked at your project and told you it’s pointless, or brilliant, or both. While in the case of vibe coding, the feedback loop is provided by the machine, and you’re constantly attempting to discern if you’re going crazy or if something genuinely valuable has been produced.What it produces is something like hypomania: a state where your productive capacity genuinely increases. You’re not imagining that you’re getting more done, you actually are, but your evaluative faculty is unaccustomed to this mode of creation. You lose the ability to distinguish between “this is good” and “I feel good making this.” Everything feels like a breakthrough. The output is real but your relationship to it is distorted.The speed and ease of vibe coding create a kind of evaluative anesthesia. You can’t tell if you’ve built something useful or just something that exists. In some way, this is the sober version of hippies in the 60s trying LSD for the first time: sometimes you may have a breakthrough, or you may have a breakdown, but regardless of which, this is the opposite of the salvation through making that Fred Turner talks about.There’s a second reason the old transformation-through-making metaphor doesn’t fit vibe coding, and it has to do with how the Maker Movement actually ended.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. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping flows upward. It accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.With both of these forces at play—no scenius phase to develop through, and value accumulating upstream rather than with the maker—the old metaphor of transformation-through-making doesn’t hold up exactly. We need a new one.The metaphor I’d offer is consumption.Specifically: consumption of a surplus intelligence. AI represents an enormous amount of available cognitive energy, and vibe coding is one way of expending that energy before it goes to waste. Think of it like a resource that’s being generated whether you use it or not—and vibe coding is the act of channeling that surplus into play, into exploration, into rapid creation that may or may not produce lasting artifacts.This framing has started showing up in various places. Rachel Thomas compares the experience of vibe coding something to the dark flow state when you gamble. The idea being that you are getting addicted to the superficial experience of creating, which might start off as flow, but eventually becomes something you are addicted to rather than something that helps you grow.Consumption almost always gets treated as a negative behavior, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or builder. Consuming is what passive people do. Builders produce.I think this framing is wrong, or at least incomplete. There are several productive ways to think about what consumption actually generates.When production becomes lightning fast with low marginal costs (when you can spin up an app in an afternoon), the scarce resource shifts to knowing what should exist. The vibe coder who burns through dozens of prototypes, building things and immediately discarding them, develops a kind of pattern recognition that the models themselves don’t have. This is judgment about what’s worth building, what feels right, what users actually want. It’s a sensibility, and sensibility is notoriously hard to commoditize because it’s illegible. You develop it by making a lot of things and paying attention to which ones felt alive and which ones felt dead.The value capture here looks like creative direction, curation, taste-making, advisory roles. You’re selling the discrimination you developed by making things and throwing them away. The ideas guy is back. At the extreme end of this path, you