Two Longbow Moments

Yeomen and Vibecoders Recasting the Technocratic Order

The oldest longbow found in England has been dated 2700 BC, but it was 4000 years later that its potential was recognized. Then it took only a century for the longbow to change the course of history.

The recognition event I’m talking about is the “Assize of Arms” of 1252, mandating the mass use of the longbow: all men between 15 and 60 were obliged to possess bows and arrows.

A century later, in 1346, the English army of King Edward III defeated the much larger French army of King Philip VI at the Battle of Crécy. More importantly, it was a victory of yeomen armed with cheap longbows against well-trained and heavily armed nobility.

The Birth of Modernity

LinkedIn is full of sensation-seaking obituaries. Every so often, somebody announces the death of a framework, technology, or profession. That is, of course, the common status signaling: follow me to stay relevant. Yet, a commentator in 1346 would’ve been right to declare: “R.I.P Knighthood.”

Indeed, amateur yeomen using cheap military technology made the professional fighters, at least the knightly version, obsolete. And unlike the mainstream interpretation of history, it was already then that modernity started.

According to the world-machine theory, modernity changed the relationships between the four classes: monarch, oligarchy, technocracy, and workers. Before the growth of commerce brought the need for accountants, lawyers and auditors, the technocracy was mainly of theological (priests) and military (knights) kind. As with a more contemporary understanding of technocracy, this codified knowledge could change social status, but at the time, it was a new phenomenon marking the beginning of a new world order.

The Battle of Crécy is arguably the moment when the relationship between technocracy and workers, in that case, knights and yeomen, began to shift. And, as with the other six relations, although it had its specifics and complexity, the dominant trend was an increase in the agency of the previously weaker class.

A Second Longbow Moment

Now we are going through a second longbow moment. The first candidate that comes to mind as a parallel to longbows would be, without doubt, military drones. And indeed, like the longbow (and later gunpowder), they have demonstrated how cheap, smart technology can cause serious damage at long range. But there is a seemingly less obvious candidate that may happen to be a historically better match: vibecoding. While drones are changing warfare, vibecoding is changing not just codefare but also worldfare and is likely to have an impact that parallels that of the longbow. Or much bigger.

In Medieval Europe, heavily armored knights represented the dominant military force. Their growing political power was fully dependent on possessing and mastering the latest military technology.

Today, at least until recently, professional developers had a similar technocratic dominance over not only the working class but the rest of the technocracy. That technocracy-worker boundary may look blurred now, but it seems the popularisation of “knowledge worker” restates the distinction, especially after the traditional collar-color-coded stratification first turned into a metaphor and then into a less reliable one. Notably, the dominance of the contemporary knight-programmer was not only over the working class but also over the rest of the technocracy. And it was from that part of the technocracy that the contemporary longbowers, the vibecoders, emerged. Yet the technological skill distance between them looks similar to that between knights and yeomen.

Knights were professionals, while the longbow archers were amateurs. Hobbyists. But it was a “mandatory hobby” from 1363 on: the new Archery Law made the archery practice obligatory on Sundays and holidays. A hobby required by law.

Vibecoding started as a hobby for non-professional coders, too. Now it seems it has become mandatory, not by law but by selective pressures.

Longbow warfare did not require each shot to be perfect. It required enough arrows, fast enough, to make perfection unnecessary. At Crécy, the English longbowmen had a far higher rate of fire than the French (actually Genoese) crossbowmen.

That is close to vibecoding. Much AI-generated code is imperfect, sometimes plainly unsafe. But the point is not flawless output. It is throughput: many attempts, many drafts, many partial wins. Most arrows miss, but enough hit to matter. Most generated code versions are brittle and some are wrong, but enough work, after review, to move the project forward. The professional developer resembles the knight or crossbowman: slower, more exacting, and more costly to waste. The vibecoder resembles the longbowman: working with volume, tolerating misses, and relying on repetition and judgment over precision.

While longbowers contributed to the development of the modernity machine, which was switched on a few centuries after the battle of Crécy, the vibecoders are now contributing to the switching on of the divergence machine. Longbowers democratized military power, but in a way characteristic of the modernity machine: standardization. Instead of highly customized technology that required many years to master, they used standard, inexpensive technology that could be operated successfully with little practice. And while standardization replaced bespokeness in the Middle Ages, today, it is bespokeness that spreads. Whereas professional programmers usually come together to build and standardize software of mass use, vibecoders individually create idiosyncratic apps for individual use. In both cases, the bespokeness itself relies on standardization: knights — metallurgical and horse breeding best practices; vibecodes — standard protocols (CLIs, MCP, web protocols) and reusable agentic primitives (skills, hooks, tools, and templates).

Another important difference is that adding a longbow to a knight's technology stack won’t make him superior to the longbow archer. But senior software engineers adding vibecoding produce amazing results.

Homo Ludens

Generative AI is an intrinsically playful technology. In world history, there hasn’t been a playful technology so powerful. And it seems its penalising those who don’t approach it as such and rewarding those who do.

Peter Steinberger — developer of OpenClaw, the biggest breakthrough in agentic engineering since Claude Code — constantly emphasizes the importance of playfulness.

Lex Fridman: In this world, if you look at 2025, so many startups, so many companies were doing kind of agentic type stuff, or claiming to. And here, Open Claw comes in and destroys everybody. Like, why did you win?

Peter Steinberger: Because they all take themselves too seriously.¹

While vibecoding refocuses attention from syntax to intent, that intent itself evolves through rapid iterations that reshape the original idea. Peter Steinberger again:

I could not have planned this out in my head, put it into some orchestrator, and then, like, something comes out. Like it’s to me, it’s much more my idea what it will become evolves as I build it and as I play with it and as I, I try out stuff.

Homo Faber today is Homo Ludens.

But Homo Ludens need time to play. And this puts indie knowledge workers in a privileged position. GenAI and vibecoding mark the third phase in the evolution of the gig economy. The first phase, 2010-2020, made the gig economy visible, and we saw the first platforms created to support it. The second boost came from the pandemic. Remote work normalized and weakened the monopoly of offices. Staying home, people had time to rethink their priorities, and many quit their corporate jobs to join the gig economy. Today, vibecoding brings a third boost. Freelancers have more time to experiment than paycheck employees. Even now that we see some companies allowing employees to use vibecoding, they cannot choose the area of application and have limitations on the tools they can use. There are no such limitations for the freelancers. The overall AI effect for them is threefold: they can turn into a micro-company doing coding, design, research and automation; they can play in new, previously inaccessible markets; and they can build apps once restricted to corporations, open-source communities and well-funded startups. To use the framing of Arthur C. Clarke, if previously some freelancers would go back to corporate jobs after a few years in the gig economy, that would be a failure of nerve. If they do it today, that would be a failure of imagination.

1. Here is the full transcript .