Whenever a new technology arrives, the impulse is to treat it as something that has never existed before. A clean break from everything that came prior. I catch myself doing this with vibe coding constantly, and I see it everywhere around me. But the most useful lens for understanding a new phenomenon is almost never the phenomenon itself. You want something adjacent, close enough to share structural similarities but removed enough to see clearly. It’s on the lookout for something like this that I started reading more about the Maker Movement of ~2005-2015.
The Maker Movement was the spiritual predecessor to vibe coding. The parallels are hard to miss. Vibe coding has slop. The Maker Movement had crapjects, a term the community coined for 3D-printed objects that served no purpose beyond proving you could extrude plastic into a shape. The Claude Code of that era was a $200 printer from Monoprice and a breadboard.
The scene around making produced what were probably the first internet-native network intellectuals. Chris Anderson (who wrote the widely-read piece about the long tail) left his editor-in-chief role at Wired to start a robotics company called 3D Robotics. Cory Doctorow wrote Makers, a sci-fi novel based around characters who are hacking hardware and business models to survive in a world where everything is falling apart. These were people who gained influence by participating visibly in a making culture and writing about what it meant.
A lot of the intellectual energy of the AI era orbits around AGI: when it arrives, what it’ll do to jobs, whether it will be aligned. The Maker Movement had its own gravitational center, and it was the idea that making physical things with your hands could produce an internal transformation. You would become more creative, more entrepreneurial, more self-reliant. The object you made mattered less than what the act of making did to you.
Puritanism With a Soldering Iron
In 2018, the media scholar Fred Turner published a paper that put this ideology under a microscope. His argument was that the Maker Movement had reinvented the theology of the Western Frontier for the digital age.
The specifics of seventeenth-century Puritanism are obviously gone. Nobody at a Maker Faire was talking about predestination. But Turner traced the literary forms and the millenarian structure—the belief that a great transformation is coming, and that individual discipline will determine who makes it through. In the Maker narrative, the American landscape is economically barren. Jobs have disappeared. Institutions have failed you. And in this wilderness, the lone individual searches inside themselves for signs of the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative spark, evidence that they are among the elect who will build their way to salvation.
Turner’s observation extends well beyond 3D printers. You can trace this same pattern through almost every hobbyist technology scene of the past fifty years. Homebrew computer clubs in the 1970s. Punk zines in the 1980s. The early web in the 1990s. Each one developed a community of practice—what Brian Eno would call a “scenius”—where people played with tools that the mainstream considered toys. Each one generated its own salvation narrative: master this tool, transform yourself, become the kind of person who builds the future.
And each one operated with a useful kind of slack. The tools were unproductive on purpose. Nobody expected your Arduino project to ship to customers. Nobody expected your homebrew computer to compete with IBM. The whole point was that you had permission to fuck around, and the finding-out happened gradually, through play, over years. This is where the old Silicon Valley adage comes from: “What smart people do on the weekends, everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”
What’s Different About Vibe Coding
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