[jmull]

> 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.

I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).

Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself. There’s certainly a cost, but hardly the only one if you’re trying to be the next big startup (for that, the high cost of coding was useful — something to deter potential competitors; you’ll have to make up the difference in some other way now).

Also, software is something that already scaled really well in the way businesses need it to — code written once, whether by human or LLM, can be executed billions of times for almost nothing. Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.

As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.

[ramathornn]

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

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.

[jackp96]

I think it's really dependent on the software. And frankly, with the current rate of development, I feel like this continues to shift.

No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.

Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.

I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.

I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.

I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.

It feels different now.

I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.

[tetha]

> 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.

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.

[nineteen999]

We didn't even have to offshore for lots of bad code to be written.

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.

[moomoo11]

Here's the thing though, and with all due respect I say this as someone who has worked with offshore teams.

They were only as good as the input they were given. They rarely went above and beyond, and most of the time getting something "good enough" was challenging. Yes, time zones, cultural differences/attitudes, and their exposure/opportunities play a big role.

What I'm saying is that teams who had bad onshore employees got horrible results. Teams that had actual systems engineers and people who could architect systems usually got great results.

For example, we were building a bleeding edge (at the time) e commerce site for one of the largest companies in the entertainment space. I made sure to work with the best people I knew at the company to design the system from the ground up. Then, we made sure the actual "functional" pieces were digestible and written plainly that we didn't need to clarify words. Nor did we write a fucking 300 page technical document. We kept things simple and effective, and all the work was broken down into as atomic pieces as possible.

The end result was that we used a team distributed between Ukraine and India to build this in about 4 months. We'd do weekly sprints, and the team had great spirits too because we actually gave a fuck about them and ensuring their success. I'm sure they're used to being scapegoats because of some lazy fucks onshore.

Now I use agents daily and have great success. However, the whole "write a sentence and AI will do it for you" is obviously bullshit. I even asked HN why I got wrong results to test what people would respond (sorry for playing you) and as I predicted they blamed me thus proving that this broader sentiment that's so prominent by "thought leaders" is stupid as fuck. So, that's where we are.

People who can actually build great systems know that it requires careful planning, deep understanding, and ability to fill in the gaps.

[bonesss]

One thought experiment I keep having when I see LLM hype: imagine if our outsourcing companies could be as blasé about copyright as OpenAI, and how profitable they could be.

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.

[lich_king]

> I never heard that

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.

[scottLobster]

Also hiring. It's easier to find people with JIRA experience than people in your vibe-coded ticket manager, even if it is technically superior for your application.

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".

[Conscat]

I was a kid at the time, but adults, magazines, and other children convinced me that 3D printing at home would likely replace a huge number of products. This included extremely optimistic speculation, like printers producing smart phones or houses. Then I dated a boy who used his 3D printer to substitute The Container Store at a higher cost with greater effort and lower quality, and that soured me on the concept.

[kiba]

3d printing matured. My makerspacr's 3d printing room is now more busy than it ever been.

But the real magic happens in CAD while printers are good enough that it gets out of your way.

[switchbak]

I think we'll see this slowly march along. I just made some custom-designed speaker tilt mount things for my desk. Sure, it's a trivially simple example, but a lot of things are. I was able to get the exact angle I wanted, bigger than most and in a design I liked, crafted by AI in 5 minutes, and on my desk by the next morning and for a fraction of the price of a Chinese made Amazon version.

It's no replicator, but give it 5 years and it might be surprising how useful it is.

[dd8601fn]

I remember hearing “trek replicator” in things like pop mechanics, back in the 90s.

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.

[Izkata]

> or houses

They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.

[pfdietz]

What we're seeing instead are companies you can send CAD files to, get estimates, and receive the parts back in a few days.

[fragmede]

Just like with vibecoding complains, have you tried the latest models (of 3d printers)? Specifically, Bambu's latest models make the printer a device to just use rather than the project itself. It's the Apple of 3d printing. Previously, you'd spend hours on calibrating and leveling nonsense. Latest models don't have this problem. Open the app on your phone, (doom)scroll until you find something, and just hit print from your phone. You can make it more complicated as desired, but it's not necessary to get something out of your printer.

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.

[OakNinja]

I recently wrote a blog post about exactly this, and I agree with your perspective. Vibe coding helps with showing other people your idea and get them to understand it, try it and, most importantly, help you fail fast. But as the product matures, the gains of using LLM's and agentic engineering will go from 10000% efficiency to something like maybe 30(?)% productivity gain? Which is still awesome, of course.

"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...

[tsss]

It's not awesome, not for us. 30% productivity gain would be enormous. Just imagine 30% of developers losing their jobs, in addition to outsourcing and all the new graduates flooding out of colleges after CS has been hyped so much in the recent years.

[jvanderbot]

> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale

No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.

[imtringued]

I personally wouldn't trust the 3D-printing community. The pre-bambu lab days were pretty bleak.

Print quality is everything when it comes to 3D printing. The printing quality must keep increasing if 3D prints are to be used as finished products. People should stop printing STL artifacts into their prints. Layer lines must fade away into invisibility. Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping. New coatings need to be developed for texturing 3d printed parts and the parts need to be ready for coating right from the print bed.

[jajuuka]

Definitely a fantasy land ideal. Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP. It's just never going to exist because reality just isn't that way.

[bsder]

> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

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.

[moregrist]

> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

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%.

[edanm]

> I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

It absolutely was the "promise" the media spun.

I had the relatively unique experience of moving from being an outsider to this field to being an insider. While I was an outsider, my impressions, formed by the media, was exactly that—3d printing would be the next big revolution, in a few years there'd be a printer in every home, etc.

I then joined a company that allocated a lot of resources to 3d printing. It only took me a month or two to realize that the big media claims were absolutely ridiculous, and didn't make any sense as stated. They misunderstood the state of the technology, and misunderstood basic economics and how regular manufacturing works.

That's not to say there's no value in 3d printing or the maker movement. There's a ton of value that's been uncovered. But the specific media dream of "people will be printing their plates at home instead of buying them in the store" was never real.

(Btw, IMO "vibe coding" is absolutely real and revolutionary, likely the biggest revolution in the software industry since, idk, the invention of the computer itself. And AI more generally is, even beyond vibe coding aspect, a revolutionary technology that will change the world in many ways.)

[iancmceachern]

>> 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.

> 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...

[aleph_minus_one]

> This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution") https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...

Interestingly, I am not aware that this book was really popular or well-known in Germany (I honestly hear about this specific book for the first time, though I am aware that some marketers (who in my opinion did not really understand the Maker scene or 3D printing) made such claims).

Instead, at that time, in Germany nerds were getting excited about understanding how to build 3D printers (in particular partially self-replicating ones (RepRap)) and how 3D printing

- could be used to make yourself much more independent of the discretion of part manufacturers (i.e. some part is broken? Use a CAD system to re-design it and 3D-print your re-design),

- makes you capable of building stuff in small scale "that should exist", but no manufacturer is producing,

- enables part designs that are (nearly) impossible to manufacture using any other existing technology, and thus basically enables you to completely reimagine and improve how nearly every produced part that you see around you is designed,

- ...

I would say that the mentioned nerd visions of this time have at least partially been implemented and/or are on a good way towards this goal. It's just that the practical implementations did not come with a spectacular change in the overarching mindet of society, but rather are highly important, but not (necessarily) revolutionary changes in the lifes of people who want these changes to be part of their life.

[noduerme]

>> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself.

Broadly true if you have $10M to throw at it, and know exactly what you want, or if what you want isn't something involving a "secret sauce".

But between competing startups doing something novel, original software is a moat. No moat is permanent; you leverage it into market share while you have time.

And no software itself is a secret, but the business logic and real-world operations it distills and caters to may be. The software is the least obfuscated part of encoding that set of operational logic, or even trade secrets, which are the DNA of a business and dictate the tools it goes into battle with.

Software being a moat (which it rarely is for long) is more of a question for the software industry. For other industries, software that amplifies best practices and crystalizes operational flow from the business logic can absolutely extend whatever moat the company already has.

In the small bore, if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested $1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.

[raw_anon_1111]

> if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested 1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.

Counter anecdote: about a decade ago I was brought in by the new to the company director to lead the modernization of their in house Electronic Medical System software that was built on FoxPro in 1999 running with SQL Server 2000 and was maintained by two “developers” who had been their for a decade.

I led another project there first that was more pressing - in house mobile software maintained by two other “developers”. It was built on top of a mobile framework by a local startup. It was used by home health care nurses for special needs kids.

After I got my head around the business, what they were trying to do - PE owned and acquiring other companies whose systems they need to integrate and their margins were low - mostly Medicaid reimbursements - I decided the best thing I could do was put myself out of a job.

I told the director we have no business trying to build up a software development department. We moved everything to various SaaS products and paid consulting companies to make all of the customizations. Meaning they sign a statement of work and come back with a finished product.

Software development was never going to be this company’s competitive moat. They got rid of the two developers maintaining the mobile app and contracted that out. The two other developers who had maintained the FoxPro app became “data analysts” and report writers.

Every company does need to know its numbers

[goatlover]

> I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).

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.

[BobbyJo]

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

Personally, I don't believe the big changes will come from "coding costs less for businesses". I think it will come from "trying new businesses is now cheaper, both in time and money". Smaller and cheaper players will be entering a lot of spaces over the next 5 years IMO.

[bob1029]

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

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.

[appellations]

The problem wouldn’t be your competitors cribbing your ideas, it would be more like letting anyone with a bone to pick audit you for minor compliance violations, customers relying on internal implementation details or judging you unfairly for legacy horrors, or devs getting self conscious about their sloppy 2am fix and prolonging an outage for rational public image/ego reasons

[rcxdude]

I think volume and cost was never really the issue. Even if 3D printing something was 3x the cost it could justify itself just by the sheer amount of overhead it can otherwise remove. Ultimately what limits 3D printing is what you can make with it, and the fact that it doesn't remove assembly as a manufacturing step. If you could 3D print full products then I think the promised revolution would have happened. (As it stands 3D printing has already had a massive impact on manufacturing. More stuff than you would think is 3D printed now, it's just not complete consumer items)

(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)

[aleph_minus_one]

> and the fact that it doesn't remove assembly as a manufacturing step

Prusa is working on a Pick & Place Toolhead for the Prusa XL to enable at least some very specific assembly steps to be done on this 3D printer:

> https://blog.prusa3d.com/xl-in-2026-new-toolheads-lower-pric...

"One Print, Multiple Components: Pick & Place Tool

Some technical prints require additional components, such as magnets, threaded inserts, or bearings, to be placed during the build. Without automation, this typically means you have to pause the print and insert the part(s) by hand. Although PrusaSlicer made this process easier a while ago, The Pick & Place toolhead can do it for you, completely autonomously. This reduces manual intervention and improves placement accuracy.

We’ve co-developed the toolhead with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and it’s designed for models that combine 3D-printed models with off-the-shelf components. We’re currently targeting late 2026 with its implementation."

[pm90]

Correct. Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”. Almost always it was just people glad they could build things.

Its also interesting how the author frames the results: Shenzhen is now better than it was ever before at manufacturing. The maker culture succeeded!

[eleventyseven]

> Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”.

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-...)

[dakolli]

Maybe its replacing the simplistic forms of backend web development and the keast capable frontend devs. If your job was building with DaisyUI/Tailwind you're prob replaceable by this tech. People building their first SaaS are amazed (its literally heroin for non technical idea guys). But serious engineers I know, old heads, don't seem to be that impressed and neither am I.

I don't see it competing with anyone doing anything serious, outside of ML engineers and lets be honest, they always sucked at writing code, hated writing code so its not surprising how much they sing it's praise.

[naravara]

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

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.

[inigyou]

It was promised but it never materialised. Everyone was saying we'd all have a 3D printer at home and there'd be no market for niche products any more because we'd just print them on demand.

[Windchaser]

Just a couple days ago, I remembered hearing "what will app-making industry be like, when you can just ask a LLM to make you one whenever you want?"

[Animats]

I heard the CEO of Autodesk giving a talk saying that. As a stockholder, I was disappointed. Just because his daughter could make dollhouse toys with a 3D printer didn't mean it was going to take over manufacturing.

[jlarocco]

I agree with you. To me the maker movement has always been about people wanting to tinker and create things for themselves. If anything "vibe coding" makes the maker movement more accessible because people who couldn't (or didn't want to) code can try to have AI code the thing they're building.

And there are plenty of people in the maker movement who enjoy writing code, and will write it whether other people are vibe coding or not.

[leptons]

3D printing is giving my company many benefits over injection molding. We have 6 variations of the case for our device and we're always coming up with improvements and new functionality, and new products. I only see us expanding our in-house resin print farm instead of building out injection molds. No, we aren't selling millions of units, but injection molding is just too expensive for anything but a 1-size-fits-all solution.

[mistercheph]

> As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.

it's the people that sell the pickaxe pickaxes.

[directevolve]

Let’s be real, it’s the men who run brothels.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/trump-canada-yukon-1.3235254

[analog31]

There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.

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.

[Animats]

> There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.

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.

[thfuran]

>Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.

Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?

[jmalicki]

They're spending money on producing software, not lines of code - for now that's a distinction

[zahlman]

> Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

It seems like a lot of vibe coders are people who otherwise wouldn't be coding at all.

[gtowey]

Yeah, it's like saying that the amateur rocketry guys on youtube are going to replace NASA.

[TurdF3rguson]

If you're a web dev you're vibe coding. You might not be admitting it, but you're using those tools. Because you would be crazy not to.

[deadbabe]

> Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

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…

[dheera]

3D printing was never intended to replace scale manufacturing; the media seemed to conjure up that story.

To the realists, 3D printing is specifically for small-scale manufacturing, rapid iteration on prototypes, etc.

[hx8]

> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

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.

[heavyset_go]

The great thing about vibecoding is we're at the point where people like me have to come in to fix core problems for apps and platforms that non-domain experts are outputting as slop.

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.

[noelsusman]

The people who did best during the gold rush were the people who went out and were lucky enough to find stockpiles of gold.

[Lionga]

The people selling vibe code pick-axes are buying them for 50 dollars and selling them for 20. Not sure if they will do the best

[asdff]

People thought 3d printing would be democratized like the inkjet printer when it first came about. And that would be powerful because so many trips to the store would be eliminated, so many lines of business put out, so many things changed from taking all that plastic junk at walmart or spare parts for your car plus everything in between and letting you snap your fingers and having it appear in your home, in every persons home.

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.

[eleventyseven]

> I never heard that.

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...)

[tracker1]

At some scales, Obama was right... a lot of companies that do plastic extruded parts also do 3D printing for lower volume fulfillment. You can also do some types of parts that you couldn't make through extrusion.

[Freedom2]

It's especially funny because HN commenters are some of the most likely people to make wild, sweeping claims then once they don't come true, turn back around and say "well no one was actually saying that anyway."

[dheera]

I also don't think the "maker movement" disappeared, it's just that the bar for making stuff is so much lower now that anyone and their grandmother can do it.

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

[ehutch79]

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

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

[evilfred]

vibe coding is only "more efficient" if you ignore the massive energy costs involved

[pradn]

One of the odd things people do with tech is taking someone else's random projections at face value?

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.

[smaudet]

Well, there's also the almost never mentioned Rock's Law:

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.

[palmotea]

> What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"...

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.

[aleph_minus_one]

> What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"

This promise did get fulfilled: helicopters do exist.