The maker movement comparison cuts both ways. What killed most Arduino projects wasn't skill gaps -- it was the cost of production at scale. The LED blinks fine; shipping 10k units breaks you. That constraint forced real learning.

Vibe coding skips that floor entirely. Software "just works" until it doesn't, and the failure mode is invisible until it's customer-facing. Hardware at least tells you when something is wrong because it sparks or stops blinking.

That said: the maker movement didn't die. It got serious -- RISC-V, open silicon, edge inference. The people who started with Arduinos are now doing real work.

My bet is vibe coding has the same trajectory. The floor failure will just be more catastrophic when it comes, because software doesn't spark.