Vibe coders? No. But I can easily see the electrical and mechanical engineers that I've worked with building modern versions of this. The software guys will laugh and say, "give me a 3-axis rate gyro and accelerometer and we can build it with no moving parts."

And I say that as a software guy who has a handful of resolvers in a drawer somewhere :-)

I think people radically underestimate how much capability we have. It's rarely necessary to do things exactly the way they were done 60 years ago.

There is still a certain percentile doing clever things.

I bet a car mechanic in the 60s would have a hard time to replicate this too.

Its always hard to talk about things or people „in general“. Sure, there are some smart people now and there wwre lots of not so smart people back then. This was not a statement that needed to be disproved. This was a statement about engineering culture in general

150 years ago an engineer was a guy with huge moustache and a hat responsible for 200 workers building a bridge that should last for 200 years.

Times change, but there is not much sense in comparing.