Comment by LarsDu88
11 hours ago
Vibe coding isn't so much a movement as a big fat tool that was air dropped from space after the megacorps decided to dump billions of dollars into LLMs and LLM companies.
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.
Circuit design has been on the cusp of being automated ever since there were computers. It's been over twenty years of autolayout tools and they're still not very good.
Maybe you could research how to make your own PCBs? It can be done at home with a little equipment and then you can offer it as a service to others.
The thing is, the cost of making them at home is both laborious, poorly reproducible, and lower quality than getting it done at JLPCB. In the old days, it was done with an exacto and rubylith. Today it requires a laser setup for about $4000 and you still need to manually apply and remove a resin layer. It's mostly not worth it to do things this way, and you lose the ability to have more than 2 layers in your board.
The bigger issue with PCBs is that even with a nice prototype, actual manufacturing needs to be done in Shenzen for any sort of cost competitiveness if you want to step outside of the hobby realm (just as the author of this essay stated).
It's really, really hard to see where the USA stands in the value chain any more once LLMs have been deployed. If all the physical manufacturing lives in China, where the manufacturing supply chain also lives, and Chinese AI companies can very very easily distill US LLM models, the two remaining US advantages is actually just the dollar's role as reserve currency --- something that crypto bros and the US president is working on eroding at a record pace, and the fact that this overvalued dollar gets all the smart people in China and India to emigrate to the US -- also becoming politically less viable.
plugging Osh Park as a non overseas PCB alternative (no affiliation)
[0] https://oshpark.com/
I'm aware of osh park, but it's immediately apparent how they are not cost competitive to China, and that this is a structural issue
The outsource-prompting-to-India stage will almost entirely be skipped (it already has been).
Developing nations that were looking to tech to climb the economic ladder, are watching that ladder be pulled up.
Most of the upside will go to the US and China. Europe is lagging shockingly on AI spend, they're extremely far behind (but with constant plan announcements). If you didn't know any better, you'd think Europe believed the year was 2010.