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.

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.”

Vibe coding broke this pattern in a way that matters.

Every previous wave of hobbyist technology went through a scenius phase—a period where small groups of weirdos played with tools before anyone expected economic output from them.

Vibe coding skipped that phase entirely. It was deployed directly to the general public, and almost immediately into the codebases of enterprise companies and well-developed products. There was no protected playground period. There was no time to accumulate the weird, useless, playful knowledge that scenius communities generate. Instead, there was immediate pressure to one-shot yourself into a hit product or solve a complex use case on the first try.

This matters because the scenius phase is where the internal transformation actually happens. When you spend two years making useless Arduino projects, you develop instincts about electronics, materials, and design that you can’t get from a tutorial. When vibe coding goes straight to production, you lose that developmental space. The tool is powerful enough to produce real output before the person using it has developed real judgment. When I speak with people who are on Claude Code 12-14 hours a day, I feel like I’m speaking to someone possessed by something, attempting to grasp a different reality. In the case of scenius, the feedback loop that tethers you to reality was provided by other humans. Someone looked at your project and told you it’s pointless, or brilliant, or both. While in the case of vibe coding, the feedback loop is provided by the machine, and you’re constantly attempting to discern if you’re going crazy or if something genuinely valuable has been produced.

What it produces is something like hypomania: a state where your productive capacity genuinely increases. You’re not imagining that you’re getting more done, you actually are, but your evaluative faculty is unaccustomed to this mode of creation. You lose the ability to distinguish between “this is good” and “I feel good making this.” Everything feels like a breakthrough. The output is real but your relationship to it is distorted.

The speed and ease of vibe coding create a kind of evaluative anesthesia. You can’t tell if you’ve built something useful or just something that exists. In some way, this is the sober version of hippies in the 60s trying LSD for the first time: sometimes you may have a breakthrough, or you may have a breakdown, but regardless of which, this is the opposite of the salvation through making that Fred Turner talks about.

There’s a second reason the old transformation-through-making metaphor doesn’t fit vibe coding, and it has to do with how the Maker Movement actually ended.

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. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.

You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping flows upward. It accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.

With both of these forces at play—no scenius phase to develop through, and value accumulating upstream rather than with the maker—the old metaphor of transformation-through-making doesn’t hold up exactly. We need a new one.

The metaphor I’d offer is consumption.

Specifically: consumption of a surplus intelligence. AI represents an enormous amount of available cognitive energy, and vibe coding is one way of expending that energy before it goes to waste. Think of it like a resource that’s being generated whether you use it or not—and vibe coding is the act of channeling that surplus into play, into exploration, into rapid creation that may or may not produce lasting artifacts.

This framing has started showing up in various places. Rachel Thomas compares the experience of vibe coding something to the dark flow state when you gamble. The idea being that you are getting addicted to the superficial experience of creating, which might start off as flow, but eventually becomes something you are addicted to rather than something that helps you grow.

Consumption almost always gets treated as a negative behavior, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or builder. Consuming is what passive people do. Builders produce.

I think this framing is wrong, or at least incomplete. There are several productive ways to think about what consumption actually generates.

When production becomes lightning fast with low marginal costs (when you can spin up an app in an afternoon), the scarce resource shifts to knowing what should exist. The vibe coder who burns through dozens of prototypes, building things and immediately discarding them, develops a kind of pattern recognition that the models themselves don’t have. This is judgment about what’s worth building, what feels right, what users actually want. It’s a sensibility, and sensibility is notoriously hard to commoditize because it’s illegible. You develop it by making a lot of things and paying attention to which ones felt alive and which ones felt dead.

The value capture here looks like creative direction, curation, taste-making, advisory roles. You’re selling the discrimination you developed by making things and throwing them away. The ideas guy is back. At the extreme end of this path, you become the protagonist of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition: someone who has such finely tuned aesthetic instincts that companies hire them simply to say yes or no to something already production ready.

Expenditure that’s visible generates spectacle, and spectacle generates attention. When you vibe-code something in public—building fast, shipping immediately, iterating in front of an audience—the product you make matters less than the performance of making it. And undoubtedly, much of vibe coding today is pure signalling performance.

The recent wave of “built this in a weekend“ posts works on this principle. The product is often mid. Sometimes it’s outright disposable. But the act of making it, timing the release, and dropping it into the network at the right moment is a performance of surplus, and people watch performances. The value capture is audience, reputation, and the optionality those create in the form of future collaborations, job offers, investor interest, consulting gigs.

This is structurally identical to how content creators already operate. A YouTuber’s individual video is an expenditure. The audience accumulated across hundreds of videos is the asset. Vibe coding just adds another medium to the content creator’s toolkit: instead of expending effort on essays or videos, you expend it on apps and tools, and you capture the attention the same way.

If you treat your vibe-coded output as gifts—open source tools, free utilities, shared templates, public repos—you’re creating the conditions to occupy an interesting or powerful position in the network. Think of the people who built the early web’s most useful free tools and resources: They became nodes that other people oriented around.

The gift economy has always been the underlying value capture strategy of open source, but the consumption frame explains why it works psychologically for vibe coders in a way that the usual advice of “build open source projects to get hired” doesn’t quite land. When you frame it as strategic career-building, it feels transactional and a little desperate. When you frame it as expending surplus, it feels natural. You have extra cognitive energy available through these tools. You spend it. You give away what you made. And the gift economy does what gift economies have always done: it creates social bonds, reputation, and reciprocal obligation.

Every time you vibe-code something, you’re generating signal. Signal about what users want. Signal about which patterns work. Signal about where the model fails, what edge cases it misses, what instructions it misinterprets. That signal currently flows upstream to model providers for free. Your prompts, your iterations, your corrections—all of it becomes training data for the next generation of models. You are, in a very literal sense, performing unpaid labor for the infrastructure layer every time you build something.

But informational exhaust can be captured before it drifts upstream. If you can structure the signal you’re generating—as proprietary datasets, as documented feedback loops, as systematic records of what works and what doesn’t in a specific domain—you end up holding something the infrastructure layer actually needs and can’t easily replicate. Every vibe coding session produces this exhaust as a byproduct. The question is whether you let it dissipate or whether you collect it. The people who collect it end up building what you might call a data fortress: a position that gets stronger with every prototype, even the ones that get thrown away, because the knowledge of why they failed is the valuable part.

This is the spirit of what early makers were accomplishing in the scenius. Trivial as their output may have been, they were immersed in the production process and through that developed a tactile understanding of their medium. With vibe coding, that data is generated for free. Will you use it?

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Consumption doesn’t have to be passive. Surplus can be spent well. The key distinction is whether you’re burning energy with some awareness of what the combustion produces—taste, attention, social capital, structured signal—or whether you’re just spinning up a dozen projects and wondering why none of them stick.

Personally, I find the consumption metaphor to be a good way to deal with the burnout that comes with constantly using AI for various things. A lot of people approach making things with the mindset of craft, and naturally extend this framing to vibe coding. That framing feels noble and it’s deeply familiar, but it’s also a recipe for burnout, because craft assumes you are reaching inside yourself and pulling something out. The whole emotional architecture of craft is transformational: you struggle, and develop mastery, and the object you produce is evidence of inner change. When the tool is doing most of the producing, that framework starts to collapse. You’re left reaching inward for something that the process never required you to develop, and the gap between the effort you expected to invest and the effort that was actually needed starts to feel like a personal failure rather than a feature of the technology.

The consumption framing sidesteps this entirely. You’re not reaching inward. You’re starting from the position that there is extra energy available and it needs to go somewhere. The question shifts from “what does this say about me as a maker” to “what’s the most interesting thing I can spend this on.” That’s a fundamentally different emotional posture, and in practice it’s a much more sustainable one.