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> would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs

The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.

Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.

3D cad is avoided by having a critical mass of other people putting their cad online. I used https://makerworld.com/models/77668 to replace my one that broke. Easy-peasy.

Similarly, it seems like people are finding out the hard way that coding is the easy part and software design/architecture is much harder.

It was always the hard part, hence why experienced eng get paid 5-10x what new grad do. It’s not because they type faster.

>printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.

I'm curious if AI will make that part more accessible. You can ask Gemini to make you a parametric openSCAD model and it can do a pretty good job for most designs I've tried. Then just plug in your measurements, export the stl to your slicer, and print.

The people empowered by AI don't have to be nontechies, just everyone who has the will for an app to exist but didn't have the means (like interest) to yak-shave into a software engineer just to build one.

It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.

Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.

I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.

Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.

As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.

The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.

Practically speaking it’s rarely cost efficient to vibe code your own all compared to buying. It might cost $100-200 in tokens alone and then there’s the time cost, maintenance, etc. Paying $10/month is cheaper.

I’ll only make an app if there’s nothing else comparable out there (surprisingly common)z

It's "free" if you want it to be.

I think there's a use case for LLM's being able to treat websites as API's (I mean, it is an API, really, running on port 80/443) but this is why attestation seems designed to ensure only large companies can do this and not end users.

> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

Considering the 3D printing barrier for entry is buying, setting up, learning, and maintaining a whole new piece of equipment vs going to a website on a phone or computer everyone already has and telling it what you want in plain english, I think the comparison is lacking.

It's really funny to be declaring the idea of 3d printers being ubiquitous as dead because they weren't a smartphone scale change in how the world works, while pretending that 3d printers aren't more common and accessible than ever.

Yeah, a better comparison than the smartphone would be something like a table saw. You don't assume everyone has one, but it's not very unusual to have one in the garage.

Yeah that's a great comparison.

> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.

I actually printed a few PETG ones. They are nigh indestructable compared to PVC.

As noted above, it's the mechanical design / CAD that has to be seriously learned to do anything useful.

You're quite wrong.

You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.

No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.

How much is a 3D printer that can print durable thermoplastics that I can use for replacement of trivial household items? I thought that would require an industrial setup to do. If you're telling me that I can just start replacing plastic crap in my house, including critical parts like plumbing, with a 3D printer that can sit in its own corner, I probably WILL buy a 3D printer.

A Bambu Lab P1S is $600, and then you gotta buy PET-CF filament, and there's shipping consider as well, so let's say ballpark $800 to start. They make more expensive printers too if you have the budget for it, but the underlying technology is mostly the same. Filament comes in 1kg rolls, and small stuff is like 50 grams, but a large piece of pipe including support structure could be as much as 500g, so if you end up printing a large amount of large items, eg https://makerworld.com/models/1441653 instead of https://makerworld.com/models/77668, which is 2g, and cheaper PLA, filament costs are going to add up.

https://bambulab.com/en-us/filament/collections/functional-p... goes through the various filaments and their different strengths and weakness, depending on the kitchen sink drain pipe you're printing.

> They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure

You and I totally would, but we're nerds!

Think of how much coaxing it takes to get the average North American homeowner to replace a leaky shower head or a spark plug. A lot of normal happy folks will spend their lives not really learning to fix things much, and that's quite alright, IMO. We don't all need to be good at everything.