Vibe Harding

AI coding tools have made programming accessible to many more people. But they may have an even more surprising effect: they might make hardware accessible too.
Hardware has always seemed harder than software. When people imagine building hardware, they picture soldering irons, circuit boards, and electrical engineering. If a terminal slightly scared away normal people from coding, the circuit board made them run away at full speed.

But is it the hardware that makes hardware difficult? Or is it actually software that makes hardware hard?

Connecting sensors and devices requires firmware, protocols, and strange data formats. Getting the parts is easy. And the components can already be bought in modular packaging. Getting them to talk to each other has historically been the hard part.
Which means hardware has always had a hidden dependency: software skill.

AI coding tools change that.

If you can describe what you want, “send temperature from this sensor to a display in my kitchen”,  the code becomes something you generate rather than something you debug.

And when that happens, hardware starts to feel like software.

You could build a small weather station with your daughter the same way people now build simple apps together. Or add a switch to your mailbox that sends a message to a display inside your house when the mail arrives.

These are small projects, but they might point to something big: we may be approaching a new wave of consumer hardware.

The companies that succeed probably won’t invent new electronics. The sensors already exist. The opportunity is packaging them into systems that are easy to start with and easy to extend.

Imagine a simple kit: a small hub, a few sensors, and a setup process that takes minutes. You plug things in, visit a landing page and a sort of vibe coded dashboard that gets everything talking to each other, and the system works immediately. But it’s also open and should encourage more “vibing”. Once it’s running, you can “vibe” new behaviors into it and the usecases are limitless. Soon your daughter is dreaming about a new pressure sensor for her birthday.

Hardware becomes something you play with.

If that happens, the audience for hardware expands dramatically. Historically it has been the domain of engineers. But if the software barrier disappears, suddenly parents, children, designers, and hobbyists can build physical systems too.

And unlike most software, hardware has an interesting side effect that's a useful counter wave to something that frustrates a lot of people these days: it pulls people away from the screen and into the physical world.

If someone packages this the right way, like a scandinavian “Auk” (plant growing package) with nice design, it could create a wave of new hardware startups.

Not because hardware became easier, but because software stopped being the thing that made hardware hard.