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'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.
For fully developed and experienced minds, both can be useful.
While I haven’t used other models like Codex and Gemini all that much recently, Anthropic’s is one of the top-tier models, and so I believe the others are probably the same in this way.
A junior’s mind will not rot because the prompt basically has to contain detailed pseudocode in order to get anywhere.
This is orthogonal to both if it is well thought-out/naive/really strange code, or LLM generated/LLM assisted/hand written code. If there is a good understanding of the task and the goals behind it, the tools become secondary. If skills are lacking, it will end up a mess no matter the tools and it needs teaching.
Most of us could run stable servers with just ssh and vi. Would suck a lot though.
Let me just get you that Fred Brooks quote, now where was it...? Ah, yes, here's one:
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.
This can also be restated as, look at all the startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and succeeded.
That’s an indicator code quality doesn’t matter at macro scales. We already knew this though even if we didn’t explicitly say it. It’s more about organization, coordination, and execution than code.
Startups are also quite different from ambulances; surviving and minimising patient harm isn't the most important thing for a startup. Instead, it's building a profitable and valuable business. You're not just worrying about the margins, you're also hoping to squeeze out every bit of growth you can.
I think it can though. It just depends. Having high quality code and making good technical choices can matter in many ways. From improving performance (massively) and correctness, to attracting great talent. Jane Street and WhatsApp come to mind, maybe Discord too. Just like great design will attract great designers.
I also think it might matter even more in the age of AI Agents. Most of my time now is spent reviewing code instead of writing code, and that makes me a huge bottleneck. So the best way to optimize is to make the code more readable and having good automated checks to reduce the amount of work I need to do, like static types, no nulls, compilation, automated tests, secondary agent reviews, etc.
I can't remember the last time I saw a '10 ways to fit 25 hours in 24 hours' type article on here, which were rife 10 years ago.
Not to say the crowd u speak of doesn’t exist, they do.
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".
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.
3D-printed 3D printers got quite far; the reason why this topic got out of perception by people who are not 3D printing nerds is rather that for mass production of 3D printers there exist much better processes.
What was realized was that up to a certain amount of parts, 3D printing these parts on a 3D printer works really well. You can find a lot of designs of such 3D printers on the internet.
Concerning the progress here, also observe that over the last years, home 3D printers got a lot better with respect to handling "engineering materials". These materials are very useful if you want to (partly) 3D-print a 3D printer, but this development is often not associated with "3D-printing 3D printers". :-)
Then you get to parts which can be printed on a 3D printer, but these parts will not be of the same quality as parts that can easily be bought, such as belts etc. The Mulbot is a design that takes this approach very far:
> https://github.com/3dprintingworld/Mulbot
> https://www.printables.com/model/5995-mulbot-the-mostly-prin...
And then you get to parts that are nearly impossible to print on a 3D printer ...
So, after there was a consensus where the boundaries lie how much a 3D printer can sensibly be 3D-printed, people started looking at other manufacturing techniques that exist for producing parts of 3D printers, and started considering
1. could and how far could a machine for this process be 3D-printed (or produced on a 3D-printed machine)?
2. could we bring such a machine to home manufacturing, too (so that people can easily build such a machine at home)?
Machines that were considered for this were, for example, CNC mill (3, 4 and 5 axis), CNC lathe, pick and place machines (for producing PCBs), ...
There do exist partial implementations of such machines, just to give some examples:
- lots of designs of CNC mills that use 3D-printed parts. I won't give a list here, but just want to mention that the "Voron Cascade" project wants to do for home 3 axis CNC milling what the Voron did for 3D printing. Rumors on the internet say that the Voron Cascade is well on the way, but had quite a lot of delays with respect to announced release dates.
- an attempt to build a pick and place machine: https://hackaday.io/project/169354-3d-printed-pick-and-place...
Thus: I hope I could give evidence that in the last years there still were a lot of developments towards the far goal of "self-replicating 3D printers", but these developments were rather silent, impressive developments instead of loud, obtrusive marketing stunts.
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.
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.
"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...
IT and coding was a good carrier for a long time, but times are changing.
Depends on where you stand. Maybe leet code won't be a common thing (can be solved with AI), maybe they'll look for different skills, etc.
If losing 30% means hiring the right people for the job you might have better chances. For a long time these were never aligned properly.
> 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...
No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.
Didn't the big AI vendors kinda bring that to fruition?
(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)
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%.
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.
It seems like a lot of vibe coders are people who otherwise wouldn't be coding at all.
Just like a five dollar t shirt is enough for many many people
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-...)
Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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 ...
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.
it's the people that sell the pickaxe pickaxes.
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...)
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.
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