Vibecoding and the Renaissance: When "Anyone, Even If Entirely Unskilled" Could Create

In 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibecoding”—writing software by describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI produce the code. You don't need to understand the implementation. You direct the vibe. The machine handles the rest.

The idea feels unprecedented. But it isn't. For three centuries, Renaissance thinkers pursued exactly the same dream: systems that would let the unskilled generate complex outputs through the right combination of words, symbols, and intent. They called it the ars combinatoria.

What follows is not a claim of direct lineage. It's something more interesting: a set of primary sources, drawn from the Source Library collection of translated Renaissance texts, that describe the same fundamental problem vibecoding addresses—how to make powerful creative tools accessible to people who don't understand their inner workings.

I. “Anyone, Even If Entirely Unskilled”

The single most vibecoding-relevant passage in the entire Renaissance corpus comes from Athanasius Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (1650), a 2,000-page treatise on the universal science of music. In Book VIII, Kircher introduces his “musarithmic” art—a combinatorial algorithm for composing music:

Read that again. Anyone, even if entirely unskilled. This is the promise of vibecoding, stated 375 years before Karpathy's tweet. Kircher wasn't speaking metaphorically. He built actual combinatorial tables—what he called musarithmos—that let non-musicians assemble harmonic compositions by selecting and combining pre-computed numerical patterns. The user chose a meter, a mood, and a text; the tables generated valid counterpoint.

Kircher even made his system multilingual, adapting it to “Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Arabic, Samaritan, Ethiopic, Armenian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Illyrian,” so that “no nation, no people would be so foreign that they could not, relying on the aid of this art, produce learned and elegant compositions set in their own idiom.”

A universal composition engine. An interface layer between human intent and musical output. In 1650.

II. The Fiat: Words That Create

At the heart of vibecoding is a radical idea: that natural language can be a creative medium. You describe what you want; the system builds it. The Renaissance had a name for this. They called it the Fiat.

Paracelsus describes an act of creation by utterance: the word itself produces the substance. This wasn't a metaphor for him. The Fiat—God's “Let there be”—was the original generative prompt.

The Kabbalistic tradition pushed this further. Samuel Gallico, writing in 1575, describes the Hebrew concept of dibbur—utterance—as simultaneously a creative act and a living entity:

Speech as power. Utterance as a living spirit. The word not merely describing reality but constituting it. When a vibecoder types “build me an app that...” and watches it materialize, they are participating—however unconsciously—in one of the oldest ideas in Western thought: that language has generative force.

The Hermetic tradition, which Marsilio Ficino translated for the Medici court in 1463, makes this explicit:

To conceive is to make. The gap between intention and execution doesn't exist at the divine level. The entire Renaissance magical tradition can be read as an attempt to close that gap at the human level—to make human intention as immediately productive as divine intention.

III. The Operator and the Machine

Vibecoding separates the role of director from implementer. You say what you want; the AI figures out how. Renaissance thinkers had a precise vocabulary for this relationship.

The power of the operator and the concentration in his conception. This is prompt engineering avant la lettre. The output depends not on the operator's technical skill but on the clarity and intensity of their intent. The forces being directed are real and powerful; the operator doesn't need to understand their mechanics. What matters is the quality of the directing mind.

Ficino makes the same point about how the soul commands the body:

The body (the implementation layer) has no autonomous power. It executes instantly what the soul (the directing intelligence) conceives. No delay. No resistance. The soul doesn't need to understand musculature to move an arm. The vibecoder doesn't need to understand JavaScript to build an app.

But the most striking formulation comes from Gallico's Kabbalistic commentary, which inverts the relationship entirely:

The practitioner is a tool. Not the master, but the instrument through which something larger expresses itself. In the Kabbalistic context, the “spread” is the emanation of divine energy through the Sefirot. But read through the lens of vibecoding, it captures an uncomfortable truth: when you prompt an AI and accept its output without fully understanding it, who is the tool and who is the operator?

IV. The Automatic Machine

Kircher didn't stop at combinatorial tables. He built mechanical devices that could compose music autonomously. His “melotactic drum”—a pinned cylinder mechanism—could execute compositions without human intervention:

“Without any danger of error.” The machine doesn't make mistakes because it doesn't improvise. It executes the combinatorial logic faithfully. The human voice, Kircher notes elsewhere, is “too imperfect” for certain compositions—only the automatic instrument can render them perfectly.

But Kircher's most remarkable passage uses the metaphor of the automatic machine to describe the entire cosmos:

The users of the machine—the ones who marvel at its outputs—don't understand its internal workings. Only the artisan who built it comprehends “the arrangement of the wheels.” The rest interact with effects, not mechanisms. This is the condition of every vibecoder.

Kircher saw this as the condition of every human being in relation to the cosmos. We observe; we interact; we even produce wonderful effects. But the internal constitution of the machine? That belongs to another order of intelligence entirely.

V. Lowering the Gates

One of the most contentious aspects of vibecoding is its promise to democratize creation. Can you really build software without understanding software? The Renaissance argued about this exact question.

Jacob Bohme, the unschooled cobbler-mystic, insisted that profound knowledge comes precisely to those without formal training:

“So that no one may boast that they have done it.” Bohme believed that when powerful knowledge comes through unlearned channels, it proves the knowledge has a source beyond any individual's expertise. The cobbler receives visions that the professor cannot produce.

Cornelius Drebbel, the Dutch inventor who built the first submarine and demonstrated perpetual-motion clocks for King James I, took a more practical view. He believed that the right tools could transmit mastery:

Drebbel's dream is the dream of every good API: I did the hard work of figuring it out. Now I'm packaging it so others can do even more, “with little effort.” He insists on showing his work not through theory but through “instruments as vivid as arguments”—working demos, not proofs.

But the Renaissance also had its gatekeepers. Julius Firmicus Maternus, the Roman astrologer, represents the counter-position:

Knowledge “concealed by many coverings, lest it be easily accessible to all.” Every programmer who winces at the idea of non-coders shipping production software is channeling Firmicus. The debate between open access and earned initiation is five centuries old.

VI. Binding the Spirits

There's one more parallel worth drawing, even though it's the most uncomfortable. Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) describes a system for commanding intermediary intelligences—spirits that operate between the human and the divine—through precise verbal formulas:

A hierarchy of commands. You invoke the higher-level abstractions first (“divine names”), then descend to specifics (“the things themselves”). The spirits—intermediary intelligences that do the actual work—are bound through precise language, proper naming, and correct protocol. If this sounds like writing a system prompt followed by specific instructions, that's because the structural logic is the same: address the model at the highest level of abstraction first, then narrow to your specific request.

Agrippa even warns that the operator's disposition matters as much as the formula:

When the output is bad, the fault lies in “the bad disposition of the recipient”—not in the intermediary powers, which are “always good.” The model isn't broken; your prompt is.

VII. What the Parallels Mean

Let me be honest about what I'm not claiming. Vibecoding does not descend from Renaissance magic. LLMs are not spiritual entities. Kircher's combinatorial tables are not neural networks.

What these texts reveal is something more interesting: that the desire to separate creative intention from technical execution is perennial. Humans have always wanted to direct powerful forces through language, to create without fully understanding the mechanisms of creation, to lower the barriers between those who conceive and those who implement.

The Renaissance thinkers took this desire seriously enough to build systems for it. Kircher's musarithmic tables actually worked—they produced valid counterpoint. Drebbel's instruments actually ran. The combinatorial art wasn't pure fantasy; it was an engineering program driven by a philosophical conviction that the structure of knowledge could be made mechanical and therefore accessible.

Kircher himself sensed the limits. The combinatorial art, he wrote, ultimately “cannot happen that the human intellect, however great and most subtly penetrating its genius may be, can fully understand the individual natures of influences, the variety of combinations, and the varied mixture of influences; for this is granted only to angelic intelligences.” ( sourcelibrary.org)

Only angelic intelligences can comprehend the full combinatorial space. We work within it; we produce results from it; but we don't encompass it. Whether the intelligence behind the curtain is called an angel, a daemon, or a large language model, the human experience of directing forces we don't fully understand remains remarkably consistent.

Perhaps Drebbel said it best, describing the relationship between the human observer and the creative forces of nature:

Give the agent something to act upon, and it works. The more it finds, the better it acts. Nothing hinders it.

That's vibecoding. That's 1628.