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.

The real parallel might be the early web era where anyone could make a website but finding them required Yahoo directories and later Google. Right now vibe coded apps have the same discovery problem - they exist but there's no effective way to find or evaluate them.

I realize that the wildest promises of 3D printing and maker stuff like Arduono never came to fruition, but maker spaces have matured greatly. If that is the analogy we are making, that means that vibecoding won’t reach “the masses” necessarily but it will be popular beyond the present audience.

- I bet that holds true after tariffs. (it does, actually): PCB Cost: $5.00 Shipping:$5.63 Total:$10.63

- I bet that holds true for custom aluminum parts, etc

for some strange reason, shipping and prices from China << shipping within the USA, still, even after tariffs

"Maker nation" might have been 3D printer company hype. Or just the whole US supply chain is full of price gouging

from individual tinkerers and ideas guys cranking out all the projects they would have never subsidized, there's a lot of that

and with corporations I'm seeing there are lots of products that would have taken 8 quarters to do, all being compressed into one now. The flip side is that all 8 quarters wouldn't have been allowed to happen as priorities would have shifted before the product or feature roadmap was ever allowed to get that far, but instead now all of it is being built out and other iterations and directions are being done simultaenously

after all of this is shown not to be saving money, or creating much value because they're doing too much without market validation, then a more intelligent approach will occur and less vibe coding will occur

But the truth is that claude code made programming much more fun to me: I skip the boring parts of writing code and hopping around files and focus on funcionality, architecture and code quality. Software engineering has never been about typing. I don't consider myself a typist (even though I'm very good at it). I'm an architect above all, and using claude code has allowed me to focus on the parts of the job I enjoy the most.

Only to be clear, I treat claude code as a junior developer that needs mentoring. I review every single diff it produces keeping an eye for patterns that go off standards, hardcoded values scattered throught the code, repeated function blocks, adequate tests and so on. I don't plan on leaving it all to claude code, because at the end of the day the one responsible for code in production is going to be me, not claude. But it's been a hell of a ride (not to mention the 30x productivity improvement, literally).

I’m not remotely thinking about AGI. I dabbled in the maker movement and it just doesn’t compare in the sheer velocity we have with GenAI and mass production of code.

It's like comparing Christianity to water wheels or gay pride to to the Saturn V rocket. It's just not really analogous in any way.

I do agree with the author about commoditization, however.

The most likely outcome is that software will be commoditized and software developers commoditized even harder. If we still need software engineers to prompt, you'll find plenty of people in India able to do those tasks, not necessarily with great quality until they too are replaced by better AI.

This whole situation inspired me to actually dive harder into Maker type stuff such as learning how to design PCBs, but one thing I found is that this TOO is very close to being automated by AI. To actually get hardware made, even prototyping PCBs, you NEED to go to China, and the Trump tariffs cut into the cost of doing these activities hard.

Bambu Labs a month others have made 3d printing far more click and print with little to no tinkering.

if youre using a pico, you can use PIO to have a bit more power. (I use it to control stepper motors with a smooth accel/decel ramp. Its doable with RMT, but not as easy.

If at all it will make me do more little hyper specific projects.

edit: I read this title wrong, thought it said "end the maker movement"

personally I enjoy creation and writing code so I'm not going to vibe code my hobby/passion project, I don't care if theoretically it'll save me x amount of time, the code is rote for me anyway but I have to be actively engaged in it to enjoy it

Im also not sure if “vibe coding” did not have a phase where early adopters were mucking around? I saw the early versions of gpt much earlier than chatgpt and a lot of folks were using transformers for coding before claude.

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

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.

No, because too much money has been pumped into it.

The author already touched on a better answer. Scenius worked because of the "permission to fuck around." Nobody expected your Arduino to ship. But the conclusion hands you four value-capture strategies and quietly revokes that permission. "Play freely, but collect the exhaust" isn't permission—it's a conditional license.

I once learned songwriting from an indie musician who refused autotune and wrote by hand. He said the point of busking isn't playing because there's an audience. It's playing when nobody stops. You play anyway. That's how you find your sound.

This gets at the root of "evaluative anesthesia." It's not that our tools are too powerful. It's that we're asking "is this valuable?" at every step. A busker doesn't ask that. Taste and judgment accumulate as a residue of immersion, not deliberate capture.

What vibe coding needs isn't a smarter consumption strategy. It might just be the courage to play to an empty street.

Lots of powerplants to fuel the surplus.

There are plenty of products now that only exist because of what it did deliver on. Any one who spends time in the niche communities where it is thriving can see that... On the low end look at Apollo automation, the story of Grismo Knives, at the high end look a Hadrian Manufacturing.

Vibe coding is a terrible name, but what a skilled dev can do with a deeply integrated AI coding assistant is amazing. It changes the calculus of "Is it worth your time" (see: https://xkcd.com/1205/ ).

Is it helpful in my day to day: it sure is. Is it far more helpful in doing all the things that have been on the back burner for YEARS? My gods yes! But none of that is matching the hype thats out there around "vibe coding".

Vibe coding does none of the above

> 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.

This version of the Maker Movement only ever existed in news articles and hype bubbles.

The Maker Movement was never about building small factories and consumer 3D printing was never about manufacturing things at scale. Everyone who was into 3D printing knew that we weren't going to be 3D printing all of our plastic parts at home because the limitations of FDM printing are obvious to anyone who has used one. At the time, consumer 3D printers were rare so journalists were extrapolating from what they saw and imagined a line going up and to the right until they could produce anything you wanted in your home.

The Maker Movement where people play with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and cheap 3D printers is possibly stronger than ever. Everything is so cheap and accessible now. 10 years ago getting a 3D printer to produce parts was a chore that required a lot of knowledge and time. Now for a couple hundred dollars anyone can have a 3D printer at home that is mostly user friendly and lets them focus on printing things.

The real version of the Maker Movement just isn't that interesting to mainstream because, well, it's a bunch of geeks doing geeky things. There's also sadly a lot of unnecessary infighting and drama that occurs in maker-related companies, like the never ending Arduino company drama, the recent Teensy drama that goes back years, or the way some people choose their 3D printer supplier as their personal identity would rather argue about them online than print.

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.

An example 3D workflow: Prototype design -> 3D print -> test/break -> production design -> real manufacturing process

The equivalent vibe code Vibecobe -> slop -> test/break -> real developers -> real development process

--

The real test for vibe coded stuff (much like 3D printed crap at craft fairs) will be if someone actually buys it. But much like those 'makers', vibe coders will have to go through the "real development process" if they want to make money at scale.

The more interesting question is what vibe coding actually democratizes. It's not engineering---it's implementation. The bottleneck shifts from 'can you write the code' to 'do you understand the domain well enough to specify what the code should do, and verify it's doing that correctly.'

I've watched domain experts---people with deep subject matter knowledge who previously couldn't build because they lacked CS fundamentals---suddenly able to ship working tools. Code quality is often brittle. But the problem understanding is sharp, because they're building something they actually needed.

The maker analogy would have been more accurate if 3D printers only failed when you asked them to print something you didn't fully understand. That's where vibe coding fails too.

It is not just vibe coding that is being developed, but general intellegence.

It's also why AI generated code is a nightmare to read and deal with, because the intention behind the code does not exist. Code outputting malformed input because it was a requirement two years ago, a developer throwing in a quick hack to fix a problem, these are things you can divine and figure out from everything else.

Then "impressive" shouldn't even be the benchmark. If someone gifted me $10K, I'm not going to care if they earned it in a competition or won it in a lottery. Value is value. I'm gratefully accepting it and not being snobby about it. I couldn't care less about how "impressive" anything is if it's useful to me.

Those problems span from fundamental architecture flaws, to issues anyone who spent 5 minutes reading the docs would never do, like create an entire app that slows to a crawl when more than one user uses it, because all parallel work gets serialized due to a complete misunderstanding of how concurrency, async/await and threads work in the language they're "writing".

People with too much money build entire apps on foundations that crumble and significantly hold them back from doing simple things, and I love it.

Seems like today they are still stuck in the tracks they were in 2016. A couple nerds own them personally. Maybe you'd find them in a maker space or a library or school. Not in your boomer parent's office though.

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...)

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 ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4UEugp_mf0

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

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.

Bump.

Because we had our first high profile murder using a 3d printed weapon just last year.

The layer lines are much less pronounced when you use a 0.25 mm nozzle with an appropriate layer height instead of a 0.4 mm nozzle (the possible quality is even on the brink to satisfy people who use 3D printing for producing miniatures). The prize you need to pay is of course the print time.

> Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping.

In the last years there was a lot of progress on ironing features in slicers, which mitigates this issue:

> https://help.prusa3d.com/article/ironing_177488

Another very recent addition to mitigate the perceived problem is the recent addition of "fuzzy skin" features in slicers, which by making the surfaces look "more rough" hides the imperfections of the FDM printing process.

--

Another solution is to simply use resin printing instead of FDM printing for finished products if feasible.

If there exists no copyright, you cannot force an entity to release the source code of their software.

A world without copyright and IP is for sure an interesting thought experiment, but very different from the FSF vision:

In such a world, there would be much more reverse-engineering and monkey-patching of existing (non-open) software that gets copied around very liberally.

On the other hand, because there exists no enforcable copyright, companies would of course invest a lot of ressources into developing hard to crack copy protection schemes. Similarly, freedom-loving hackers would invest serious ressources into cracking such copy protection schemes.

Didn't the big AI vendors kinda bring that to fruition?

Could be different this time around, or could be that the early naive optimism is just more widespread.

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.

I think it's cool in a nerdy way, and I might even do it if: I was into shooting (I find it boring), and my government hadn't outlawed anything related to 3d printing and firearms entirely.

Of course there is a crew of people that want to print guns (not just accessories) for libertarian or criminal purposes - That seems like a lot of time to waste given how easily you can access guns (in the USA anyway). I'm not convinced that's a huge community, but I could be wrong.

I don't know if it's a local trend or what but the last 5-7 years the most in demand thing by far are sewing machines, knitting machines, and sergers. They ended up completely scrapping the woodworking area to fit a digital jacquard loom and that thing is booked around the clock, you have to plan 4-5 weeks in advance to get a session. Jeweler's bench is similarly busy.

In contrast the soldering and electronics workstations get regular use but I can usually just walk in and get a spot without scheduling or waiting much, which is almost never the case with the fabric stuff.

Just like a five dollar t shirt is enough for many many people

Most jobs lost to AI is just companies that want / need to lay people off and shareholders like "Replaced 30% of our workforce with AI" more than any other conceivable reason.

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.

IT and coding was a good carrier for a long time, but times are changing.

If you did Illustrator in an afternoon it should only take a week or two for the whole product line?

Nowadays, we are so used to all the injection molded plastic crap, and also so much poorer, that we can't understand why precisely manufactured products made from solid metal or wood are so expensive.

You can get 3D printers from BestBuy(!) for $200 retail. At that point, the cost of the filament is going to quickly exceed the cost of the machine.

At the $200 price point, your Bill of Materials is roughly $65 (about 1/3 of the retail cost). I challenge you to buy the raw materials of a 3D printer for under $100 let alone $65.

Let me just get you that Fred Brooks quote, now where was it...? Ah, yes, here's one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4560756

I do believe that this vision is basically correct, but the implementation of these eager 3D printing enthusiasts was deeply flawed:

There exist lots of designs of really good 3D printers on the internet that are at least partly 3D-printed. So at least a relevant subset of the parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed. The reason why commercial 3D printers are typically not 3D-printed is rather aesthetics and the fact that for large-scale manufacturing there typically exist much cheaper production techniques.

As people by now have realized (and some of these points were told to these eager 3D printing enthusiasts from beginning on), the correct approach to get towards an exceptional "mostly 3D-printed 3D printer" is rather:

- Improve 3D printers so that even more parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed in high quality (e.g. by improving sensors and software to increase precision; make the 3D printer capable of handling engineeering materials; ...)

- Use a 3D printer to produce parts for machines that can be used to produce parts for a 3D printer, such as CNC mill, CNC lathe, pick and place machine (for populating the PCBs) etc.

Both of these aspects are hot topics that people work on.

In other words: Accept for now that many, but not all parts of a 3D printer can currently sensibly be 3D-printed, and invest serious efforts to develop solutions how 3D printing can be used to enable a high-quality production of these remaining parts.

I'm able to take on way more interesting and challenging projects in my business because the logistics and legwork required for implementing them are greatly simplified by being able to actually implement the specs for the software I've had in my head for years.

This is a stark contrast to pre-2024 or so. I've always been an explorer, a fairly prolific software developer I guess, but now it's so much more than that. And it's leaking into hardware and other physical ventures. I'm typically limited by funds more than anything.

Are some of my projects lower quality than if they were done by someone more qualified? Yeah, totally. Though I think I still do a solid job. I don't care though; these things have opened my eyes and mind so much and made creating so much more inviting and exciting.

It still burns with the 'career careening into the dirt' vibes I get most days, but what the hell, it was good while it lasted. If I was smart enough to make the computer do the thing, maybe I'll be smart enough to do something else that's useful. And I've got some years left before it's truly end of the line, I think.

I see.

> What's the last thing you made?

Based on you outranking me in the gatekeeping hierarchy. :)

This isn't the first time something like this has happened.

I would imagine that people had similar thoughts about the first photographs, when previously the only way to capture an image of something was via painting or woodcutting.

some people build apps to solve a problem. why should they not share how they solved that problem?

i have written a blog post about a one line command that solves an interesting problem for me. for any experienced sysadmin that's just like a finger painting.

do we really need to argue if i should have written that post or not?

A single engineer assigned to maintain your in-house solution will cost more than this.

I think most engineers vastly overestimate how important high quality, maintainable, reliable code is to product success. Yes, you need an experienced engineer to steer Claude into making good high-quality code. But your customer doesn't see your code, they don't see how many servers you need or how often an on-call engineer is woken up. They just see how well the app meets their needs

I predict we will see a lot of domain experts without engineering background spin up incredibly successful apps. Just like the Tea app many of them will crash and burn from poor engineering. But there will also be enough people who've grown wise to this and after reaching some success with their app spend the resources to have others mitigate all the unknown-to-them issues

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.

Wait, I think I have the answer!

"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"

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.

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.

Or something. You're right.

You are essentially saying that we should develop other methods of capturing the state of the program to prevent unintended changes.

However there’s no reason to believe that these other systems will be any easier to reason about than the code itself. If we had these other methods of ensuring that observerable behavior doesn’t change and they were substantially easier than reasoning about the code directly, they would be very useful for human developers as well.

The fact that we’ve not developed something like this in 75 years of writing programs, says it’s probably not as easy as you’re making it out.

That's a bit shortsighted. There have been cries of software becoming needlessly bloated and inefficient since computers have existed (Wirth, of course, but countless others too). Do you visit any gamer communities? They are constantly blaming careless waste of resources and lack of optimization in games for many AAA games performing badly in even state of the art hardware, or constantly requiring you to upgrade your gaming rig.

I don't think the only scenario is boring CRUD or line of business software, where indeed performance often doesn't matter, and most of it can now be written by an AI.

The in-code tests and the expectations/assumptions about the product that your users have are wildly different. If you allow agents to make changes restricted only by those tests, they’re going to constantly make changes that break customer workflows and cause noticeable jank.

Right now agents do this at a rate far higher than humans. This is empirically demonstrable by the fact that an agent requires tests to keep from spinning out of control when writing more than a few thousand lines and a human does not. A human is capable of writing tens of thousands as of lines with no tests, using only reason and judgement. An agent is not.

They clearly lack the full capability of human reason, judgment, taste, and agency.

My suspicion is that something close enough to AGI that it can essentially do all white dollar jobs is required to solve this.

The point of this thread: the maker movement isn’t dead simply because most people don’t care about CNC machines. In reality, there are loads of makers & people who love tinkering and building things for themselves, it’s easier than ever to do so (and to build very non-trivial products for yourself), and more and more people are able to get into this.

If the maker movement was actually dead, we wouldn’t be seeing an explosion of powerful, easy-to-use manufacturing tools available at lower & lower price points.

I guess your point is that it’s not exactly mainstream, not that no one is buying them. Which is true, but who cares.

Sanity is for my personal projects.

(I’m not saying it’s not used, but the only thing I’d use TTL for is building old circuits out of the Forrest Mims books.)

It’s not a person. You understand that, right? I have to ask considering the amount of people who are “dating” and wanting to marry chatbots.

It’s a tool. There’s no reason to anthropomorphise it.

I will admit that as a whole, this thread has made me super sad even while I'm confident pg would say that most people revealing themselves to be uninspired pessimists can be seen as a major source of opportunity for hackers.

I just wish that so many people weren't so easy to slot into the matrix, if you know what I'm saying.

I don't know why someone who thinks like you hangs out on Hacker News. Wouldn't you be more at home on Passive Consumer News? I'd suggest you go make that real, except... never mind.

How much longer do we have to put up with people saying this? It's been four years now.

Without wanting to be argumentative, I would push back and say that I really did stop to consider my implied assignment of personhood before committing to it. I went with it because it reflects both the role it plays - you'll be relieved that I stopped short of deploying "mentor" - and the fact that English is highly adaptable and already the linguistic tug to use They feels very comfortable in relation to LLMs. Buckle up!

https://chatgpt.com/share/69a184b0-7c38-8012-b36d-c3f2cefc13...

I definitely led some questions to try and squeeze new-to-me perspectives out of it; for example, there could be tricks that make the active high variant more useful in some scenarios.

I think it does a good job of surfacing adjacent questions you might not realize you were eager to ask, as well as showing how it's able to critically evaluate real-world part suitability. I do find that ChatGPT in particular does better with a screengrab of the most likely parts vs a URL to the search engine.

What you seem to be missing is that LLMs are better at/for some things than others. Legal review, 3D geometry, therapy and apparently chemistry are off the list.

It doesn't make sense to project that onto domains where it excels.

That's now. Right now, the tooling exists so that for >80% of software devs, 80% of the code they produce could be created by AI rather than by hand.

You can always find some person saying that it'll destroy all jobs in a year, or make us all rich in a year, or whatever, but your cynicism blinds you to the actual advances being made. There is an endless supply of new goalpost positions, they will never all be met, and an endless supply of chartalans claiming unrealistic futures. Don't confuse that with "and therefore results do not exist".

Today I fed to Opus 4.6 five screenshots with annotations from the client and told it to implement the changes. Then told it to generate real specs, which it did. I never even looked at the screenshots, I just checked and tested against the generated specs. Client was happy.

I don't know what it means.

What I like about information from humans is that humans are always trying to figure out how to say things that are relevant and informative. By “relevant”, I mean that we try to avoid saying things that don’t help you. By “informative”, I mean that we try to include information that you want to know, even if you didn’t specifically ask for it.

Picking on the chat for a moment—when you started out with the question, my first thought was, “This person is specifically asking about HC versus HCT, but maybe they want a broader overview of logic families, and maybe they want to understand which logic family to pick for their hobby project.” That’s an example where I think ChatGPT could have identified something that you wanted to know, but didn’t. (It wasn’t as informative as it could have been.)

Then there’s some times that ChatGPT gave you information of dubious relevance.

> Important: On the HCT125, the enable is active-LOW.

I don’t think that’s contextually important. It’s like saying, “Important: On the Honda Civic, the gas tank is on the left.” That’s contextually important when you’re at the gas station, but not when you’re buying a car.

I’m not sure why the LLM is recommending the TTL-compatible chips. IMO, the right thing to do here is probably to run everything at 3.3V, unless you have something that specifically needs 5V. When everything is at 3.3V, you don’t have to think about level shifting and you can just pick a very boring logic family like AHC. But I don’t know what you’re building. Likewise, I would lean towards using normal CMOS logic levels, unless I had a specific reason to choose TTL-compatible. The regular CMOS versions have better noise margin, because the threshold is in the optimum place—right in the middle.