Leonardo da Vinci would've loved vibe coding.
He wouldn’t have called it that, of course. But he would’ve understood it. He would have recognized the spark of curiosity that drives a developer to open a blank file, summon a model, and start poking at possibility. The Renaissance master of anatomy and flight would have seen himself in the modern programmer who spins up an idea, not to execute a plan, but to discover what’s in the stone.
Because vibe coding isn’t about building something specific. It’s about exploring ideas, pushing the envelope, seeing what the model can do, following the shape of emerging thoughts, moving wispy ideas past their initial coherence until something surprising appears. Then stepping back, chiseling away, asking: what’s really there?
This is how Leonardo approached sculpture, drawing, engineering, language. His notebooks are filled with prototypes that don’t work, ideas that double back, sketches that revise themselves mid-line. His genius wasn’t just in talent; it was in curiosity as method. He used invention to find form.
And that's what vibe coding is becoming too. It’s not hacking toward a spec. It’s modeling as sketching. Prompting as gesture. Letting the stone speak.
Take David. Michelangelo described the process as liberating the figure already trapped inside the marble. Da Vinci, had he sculpted it, would have started messier: anatomical notations, emotional variants, mechanical postures. He would have asked: what kind of human stands tall after defeating a giant? What weight rests in the forearm? What thought lives behind the brow?
He would have overbuilt the first version. Then he would have reworked it—paring it down to its core, sanding away the grandiosity until all that remained was the glance, the line, the pressure of thought before motion.
That’s what makes a prompt powerful, too. Not that it’s precise—but that it finds the pressure point of the idea. A vibe coder doesn’t start with clarity; they wander into it. They provoke the model, feel around its emergent response, and slowly shape the direction toward something they recognize.
Modern LLMs aren’t chisels—they’re mountains of cracked marble. Weird, infinite, soft marble that responds in probabilistic swirls. You don’t command it. You wrestle it. You find contours. You cut. You revise. Until what emerges feels inevitable.
That’s the art.
Leonardo wouldn’t have just used the tools. He would have delighted in them—models as conversation partners, code as sketchbook, infinite canvases for experimenting with motion, expression, cognition. He would have built new ones. Not to automate art, but to extend it. To stretch the reach of the human hand.
In the end, the lesson of David—and of da Vinci—is that the work begins in exploration, but ends in essence. You model the chaos to find the core. You vibe until you chisel.
And when it's done, you leave behind something deceptively simple. Something that began not with a plan, but with a spark.