There was a short moment in history where it seemed that the sentiment was: people will soon 3D-print 99% of their household items themselves instead of buying them.
You absolutely could print things like cups, soap holders, picture frames, the small shovel you use for gardening, and so on an so on.
I think some or maybe even many of those shortcomings will apply to software, too. Making actual good software is not as trivial as writing “make me an app”, much as making an actual good spoon is not as trivial as throwing an STL at a printer and calling it a day.
Everything will undoubtedly feel nice/premium as a result of being metal and glass, but you spend more time looking at the entire interior than touching every part of it, so appearance is important.
For things like volume, A/C, adjusting mirrors and seats, I really, really want physical buttons. Not sure what I will do after my old Volvo dies, maybe the touchscreen mania will have gone away by then and physical buttons will be back. I can't imagine myself touching a screen while driving, I don't even know how I would be able to do that.
I just got a 2026 model year car and all of those items had physical controls.
Even with my other car that is mostly just a screen all but A/C is physical controls, but one really shouldn't be messing around with that while the car is in motion anyways, outside of operating the defrosters. I manage to practically never touch the AC.
It went from below freezing nearly every day to 80F+ in a week. I didn't have to touch the AC controls once. I don't get why people choose to distract themselves by toying around with the AC controls while driving. Focus on driving. Let the thermostat keep the car comfortable.
When the car is in motion you really shouldn't be messing with anything in the center console. I don't even bother with the volume knob on the stereo, just use the media controls on the wheel. Why take your hands off the steering controls when you don't have to?
This is quite a wild take — but I‘m willing to not dismiss it outright. Not that I’m in any position or capacity to know anything more than the next guy about these matters. But it has a „so wild it could actually be true“ vibe.
Just a single data point, and I‘m not pretending it’s a conclusive one (yet), but I think there is a middle ground between buying a SaaS and vibe coding a replacement: replacing a SaaS with your own solution, using AI coding agents — while actually knowing what you do because creating robust software in-house is already a core competency. No vibe coding needed.
At my company, we build software every day because our business is running a job board.
We always had kind of an impedance mismatch when it comes to creating content pages (think landing pages for marketing).
Yes, we can do this ourselves, but then software engineering resources are in conflict between shipping the next feature and creating landing pages.
So we introduced Webflow. Now marketing could create their content themselves. Did it match our corporate identity? Hopefully. Was it technically sound? Sometimes. Was it fun for software engineers to fix things in Webflow. No.
It kind of worked, but wasn’t exactly ideal.
Meanwhile, software engineering became more and more productive with the advent of AI coding agents, Cursor in our case.
So we tried another approach: giving our content creators Cursor.
But that was brittle, too: Cursor presents an overwhelming complex UI for someone who never used an IDE before, it could do a thousand things while only three are actually needed in this use case, you have to explain git on top of Cursor. It kind of worked, but only kind of.
It’s like a hyper-focused „Cursor light“ in the browser, so our content creators can just „chat away“ and create their content pages, with all the guardrails baked into the product. Getting tracking pixel integration etc. right just works. Matching our style guide perfectly just works.
And as a bonus, there is a whole git based storage and versioning workflow underneath, so software engineering can support and test and deploy the results with their preferred tools and methods, but none of this complexity leaks through to the content creators.
We built this ourselves in days, not months, thanks to Cursor, but it’s not vibe-coded — it’s a rock solid application that we will support and improve long-term without headaches: https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp
BC if someone has enough money to deploy an instance of openclaw that can just randomly spend $1k on tokens, their time may be to valuable to be spent on menial tasks.
And wouldn't it be better for agents to post these tasks to existing crowdworker sites like MTurk or Prolific where these tasks are common and people can get paid? (I can't imagine you'd get quality respondents on a random site like this...)
You absolutely could print things like cups, soap holders, picture frames, the small shovel you use for gardening, and so on an so on.
99% of people still just buy this stuff.
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