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AI Programming Linux

Even Linus Torvalds Is Vibe Coding Now 54

Posted by BeauHD from the well-well-well dept.
Linus Torvalds has started experimenting with vibe coding, using Google's Antigravity AI to generate parts of a small hobby project called AudioNoise. "In doing so, he has become the highest-profile programmer yet to adopt this rapidly spreading, and often mocked, AI-driven programming," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. Fro the report: [I]t's a trivial program called AudioNoise -- a recent side project focused on digital audio effects and signal processing. He started it after building physical guitar pedals, GuitarPedal, to learn about audio circuits. He now gives them as gifts to kernel developers and, recently, to Bill Gates.

While Torvalds hand-coded the C components, he turned to Antigravity for a Python-based audio sample visualizer. He openly acknowledges that he leans on online snippets when working in languages he knows less well. Who doesn't? [...] In the project's README file, Torvalds wrote that "the Python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding," describing how he "cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualiser." The remark underlines that the AI-generated code met his expectations well enough that he did not feel the need to manually re-implement it. Further reading: Linus Torvalds Says Vibe Coding is Fine For Getting Started, 'Horrible Idea' For Maintenance
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Even Linus Torvalds Is Vibe Coding Now More

Even Linus Torvalds Is Vibe Coding Now

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  • To be fair (Score:5, Insightful)

    by liqu1d ( 4349325 ) on Monday January 12, 2026 @08:58PM (#65919688)
    Someone of Torvalds caliber is someone I would trust with vibe coding. Bob who woke up one day and decided he was a software architect, changed his LinkedIn and landed a job at totallysecuresystems llc writing HIPAA compliant software is the one that scares me.

    • Re:To be fair (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Monday January 12, 2026 @09:07PM (#65919714) Journal
      That’s a systems failure, not a Bob failure. Code is never produced, vetted, QA’d and promoted to production in isolation. Every stage that accepts code needs to understand where it comes from. I produce similar code: functional, and delivered fast. Great for innovation and prototypes, not so much for production and certainly not for maintenance. And that is how I sell my efforts. I will not take part in developing an MVP that will at some point be promoted to be the code base for the actual product. My code works. But it is to be thrown away once it has served its purpose. That is where I see AI generated code right now.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      And it's no surprise that an experienced professional programmer would experiment with new tools, particularly of such high profile.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by roman_mir ( 125474 )

      literally 2 hours ago I was talking to a client at his office, it is a truck carrier company with over 100 trucks and drivers. The owner showed me a few projects he has been vibe coding this week. In less than 7 hours he created a portal with some 30+ screens, all for collecting and modifying information related to dispatching trucks across the border, integrated this with his existing TMS (Transportation Management System), integrated messaging and notifications between dispatchers and drivers via both,

      • Re:To be fair (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @04:09AM (#65920126) Homepage

        Vibe coding is such a weird experience. Claude 4 Opus combined with modern Cursor or Claude Code agents is so powerful these days. You can actually handle sizable projects now without the model losing its way. I've been vibe coding a rather complex Shopify store (Shopify is easy if you plan to do things the way they thought of but a nightmare if you want to do anything outside their workflow), and it's a trip having Claude use all sort of tools and services that I've never even heard of before, and something perfectly functional comes out.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I asked him what language was the code written in? He did not know and did not care. He asked v0.app to tell him. It was react, next.js API routes, node.js runtime, typescript for type safety, PostgreSQL (via neon), prisma.orm, cookie-based authentication system.
        PDF generation (@react-pdf/renderer), date handling utilities, ui-components. He doesn't know what languages are used, how it is dwployed, whatever. He doesn't care much how the source is kept, as long as it is, he doesn't care how it is deploed. He

        • I did not say anything about your job, I did not say anything about anyone's job actually. I said that a person was able to throw together a system that he wanted, the way he saw it, all without knowing the first thing about running a debugger, a compiler, without understanding what *language* or what libraries or what frameworks are used for anything at all. Development, deployment, source code, running environment, nothing. He is absolutely enjoying himself because just like anyone else who was able to

      • Re:To be fair (Score:4, Interesting)

        by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @11:50AM (#65920850)

        Reminds me of a situation years ago. A friend of a friend once asked me for some help optimizing some reports he built for his job on his own. He opened this web page with 60+ reports running. It took forever to load as it was loading 60+ reports some of which pulled years of data. The first question I asked is why he needed it to load 60+ reports on load. The first suggestion was to create a front page and then select the reports he wanted. The second question is whether he needed years worth of data for some reports. The last question was did he know the numbers were right. Since he built those reports, he created the calculations. For example his gross profit calculation was sales - cost, but he did not include refunds as his system did not treat refunds as negative sales.

        Just because the owner and my friend built a bunch of things does not mean they are right. Getting good results should be the goal not any results.

        • I disagree. Getting some results is better than getting no results at all and that's that. The person I am talking about was happy to get results from his work (and yes, he still did the work, someone still has to do the work). You assume that your work would be significantly better than the work that a non coder can achieve with a system like this, maybe you are right. However if without this AI system there wouldn't have been any results at all, that would have been much worse for the business in ques

          • I disagree. Getting some results is better than getting no results at all and that's that.

            And if your "some results" is wrong? In my exact example, he did not calculate gross profit correctly. That could lead to the wrong conclusions.

            The person I am talking about was happy to get results from his work (and yes, he still did the work, someone still has to do the work). You assume that your work would be significantly better than the work that a non coder can achieve with a system like this, maybe you are right.

            Nowhere did I say that. Nowhere did I create a pissing contest on whether I was better than this person. I don't give a crap if he asked CoPilot to create his reports. My point again is he needs to check his work. He did not seem to do that and since his last step was to tie in his results into his accounting books that might cause all sorts of issues down the lin

            • The system is not about telling him how many trucks to deploy or whatnot, it is about communicating the information from his TMS and his inputs to the driver and to the border patrol (integration with the customs). If he is wrong and his work doesn't produce good results he will end up paying fines at the border because if the documentation is wrong or incomplete or is not on time then that's what happens - companies are fined, so there is a risk associated with it but there is always a risk, would you say

              • The system is not about telling him how many trucks to deploy or whatnot, it is about communicating the information from his TMS and his inputs to the driver and to the border patrol (integration with the customs).

                That's not what you said. You said his system was "all for collecting and modifying information related to dispatching trucks across the border" Modifying information affects what trucks are deployed.

                If he is wrong and his work doesn't produce good results he will end up paying fines at the border because if the documentation is wrong or incomplete or is not on time then that's what happens - companies are fined, so there is a risk associated with it but there is always a risk,

                I consider being fined not a good result. Unlike what you just said above, if he did nothing, he may not have been fined. He modified the system; the risk is he would get fines.

                would you say that there is no risk when humans are doing it by hand (and I do not mean you, specifically, I mean any humans doing anything by hand)?

                I never said anything about "doing anything by hand." That's another strawman argument. My complaint on vibe coding is that AI hallu

                • ok, all of this is for what? I think some results is better than no results. Also I am certain that if he ends up paying some fines, then fixing the problem is an acceptable result, maybe not worse than building the code in a software shop by hand. Also I don't think he is unaware about the potential problems, including fines, he is willingly taking the risk. Beside that he is integrating with some existing systems, where it is completely possible to check if all of the data was properly sent to the custo

      • This is exactly why Excel became so popular. Business people could slap together a spreadsheet to do exactly what they wanted without needing to get a programmer involved. It will also lead to the same kinds of problems that happened over time with Excel spreadsheets being used for bizarre things.

        Vibe coding will take off. It will also fail in both subtle and spectacular ways.

        There is going to be a lot of money made fixing problems.

    • Re:To be fair (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @12:45AM (#65919944)
      He's also doing it in a hobby project to save some effort. It's sort of like saying "$famous-person uses duct tape to patch up garden hose, perhaps we should consider using it to build houses now". OK, that's a crap analogy but you know what I mean.

    • I can't wait to wake up one day and see posts from everyone on Slashdot acting like they were all vibe coding before it was cool. No more bitching about how the automobile will never replace their horse. Embrace it now or get left behind.

    • Why? Serious question. Linus Torvalds has not written a lot of lines of code in his life. He's a technical manager. He's not been involved in serious problem solving on a sustained basis, he leaves that to his lieutenants and the volunteers who do the actual coding and problem solving, then hand it to his organization on a platter.

      Linus is an important figure, but a programmer he no longer is....

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by azouhr ( 8526607 )
        Linus Torvalds may not have written much code, but there are not many people who reviewed as much code as he did. And typically, he really can point to issues in the code. You might also not be aware, that Linus Torvalds is the original author of git -- something he wrote in 10 days and thought it would not last.

        I guess there is not many people with that much impact on todays software industry like Linus Torvalds. When he reviews some code and tells that it is ok, it probably really is good. Else he simpl

        • I'm not sure if you are aware, but Linus wrote only a basic prototype of git over a couple of days. In the last 20 years he hasn't contributed while the tool has gone through many revisions.

          Like I said, Linus is a manager, not a programmer. That's not a bad thing, but doesn't make him the ideal vibe coder. Moreover, you wouldn't actually want him to vibe code, ever: He has a social role which he is suited for, and nobody could replace him in that role.

      • Why? Serious question. Linus Torvalds has not written a lot of lines of code in his life. He's a technical manager.

        I think you are confusing the situation where Torvalds does not write a lot of code currently with his lifetime experience of writing code. To use a sports analogy, that is like saying Retired Star Footballer knows nothing about the game because he did not play in many games in the past as he does not play many games now.

        He's not been involved in serious problem solving on a sustained basis, he leaves that to his lieutenants and the volunteers who do the actual coding and problem solving, then hand it to his organization on a platter. Linus is an important figure, but a programmer he no longer is....

        Again I feel you do not know what Torvalds does on a daily basis. He's not surfing the Tiktok all day while his lieutenants do all the work. He is currently the lead developer for the Linu

        • Close. I am not saying that he knows nothing, I am saying he's a technical manager.

          The analogy might be a supreme court judge. They make important decisions when issues are submitted to them, but that doesn't mean they would make good day to day trial judges. Their competencies lie elsewhere, and their decisions, while momentous, are highly restricted to the handful of cases brought to them.

          • The analogy might be a supreme court judge. They make important decisions when issues are submitted to them, but that doesn't mean they would make good day to day trial judges.

            The part you seem to ignore is if that Supreme Court Judge was and is still a trial judge. Torvalds had been programmer; he had solved problems on a technical level. He still does when dealing with the kernel. While he is more of a lead, he weighs in on a variety of subject which require technical skills. For example this was his take on why he rejected the RISC-V submission in addition to the request being late:

            Like this crazy and pointless make_u32_from_two_u16() "helper".

            That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid "helper".

            If you write the code out as "(a << 16) + b", you know what it does and which is the high word. Maybe you need to add a cast to make sure that 'b' doesn't have high bits that pollutes the end result, so maybe it's not going to be exactly _pretty_, but it's not going to be wrong and incomprehensible either.

            In contrast, if you write make_u32_from_two_u16(a,b) you have not a f%^5ing clue what the word order is. IOW, you just made things *WORSE*, and you added that "helper" to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make *other* code worse too.

            The line of code submitted: "#define make_u32_from_two_u16(hi, lo) (((u32)(hi) << 16) | (u

    • Re:To be fair (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert@slashdot.firenzee . c om> on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @04:10AM (#65920132) Homepage

      That's the point. LLMs are not a replacement for experienced coders, they're a tool to help an experienced coder be more productive.
      If used properly they can be highly beneficial, if misused they can cause chaos - like millions of other things.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Also note "trivial program" and "side project" and "experimenting". This is not an endorsement of "vibe coding" by him and saying he is "adopting" it is simply a direct lie.

  • Further Reading (Score:5, Insightful)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Monday January 12, 2026 @09:18PM (#65919726)

    Further reading says:
    "Linus Torvalds Says Vibe Coding is Fine For Getting Started, 'Horrible Idea' For Maintenance"

    It wasn't that Lunus had a "Hey, vibe coding is great" moment. It was "This is a trivial, one-off task and I can't be arsed wasting my valuable time on it".

  • I think a programmer... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ndsurvivor ( 891239 ) on Monday January 12, 2026 @10:00PM (#65919790) Journal
    If you have programmed all of your life, like I have, you know what your doing. The syntax gets kind of irritating, and you (me) are mostly concerned with variables, and loops. AI is great at syntax, but lousy at nearly everything else. It seems like a great ... how to say it... sympathetic relationship.
    • If you just pick up a project in development and ignore the syntax of the community, and the scope the library is expected to involve? You get bad code, always did and always will. Real language prompting just makes it much, much worse and much much faster to produce. I wish the pre version 1 linux commits were up somewhere so people can compare the flood of garbage completely lacking context to some of the garbage being pushed now........
      • I really didn't understand what you said, but I want to say that to a purist, everything in Linux should be written in C. It is what Unix is based on. But I am agnostic, give me the syntax, and I will write in what ever language you want.

    • Yes, this. I counted recently the number of languages I've programmed in. The answer is 28, from COBOL to C# and lots in between. I know what I want to express, but learning yet another syntax that's supposed to be somehow "better" but isn't, is annoying. When AI spits it out, I can instantly tell whether it's right, but learning trivia like in Vue.js, a leading : means the following value is contained within a variable rather than a literal, that's just annoying.

  • Vibe coding is not the same as AI assisted coding (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fabiomb ( 5315421 ) on Monday January 12, 2026 @10:13PM (#65919816)
    Vibe coding refers to someone who doesn't understand what he's doing, probably a non-programmer, but AI Assisted Coding is what a programmer does, use it as a tool, not the core of the process, the Junior Dev at your service, Linus can understand what the AI does, it's not "vibe", please adopt new expressions for this
    • Vibe refers to the fact that some problem is being described in a loose way using natural language. It's the natural language that is the bottleneck in expressing the programmer's ideas into code. That's why traditional programming involves people learning a new, technical language that allows precise descriptions of what should be done. It bypasses the need to guess what the program should do from a loose wordy description. Natural language is also why AI coding is frustrating, it's not precise enough. Wha

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      Vibe coding has nothing to do with who the user is and everything to do with how it's used.

      AI-Assisted Coding: You look at every line of every diff suggested by the AI
      Vibe Coding: You accept all lines suggested by the AI without looking at them.

      You can have been a programmer for 60 years and still vibe code.

  • We need a new term (Score:3)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Monday January 12, 2026 @10:13PM (#65919818)

    The term "Vibe coding" implies code created from a prompt entered by a clueless person with zero understanding of the result
    We need a term that covers use of powerful tools by an expert who understands and approves the output

  • Adopt? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    He's experimenting with it for fun, not adopting it.

  • The Linux kernel will be filled with bug-ridden trash in no time.
  • Vibe coding is like managing a flawed team of coders. I think it is right up his alley. I wish I had his prerequisites.
  • I only use free AI like Gemini and ChatGPT, and only for small programs (generally Python or bash, at most a few 100 lines long). It's great as a timesaver, and as a search and learning tool.

    The thing is, you have to learn how to precisely tell the AI what you want, if you want to get what you actually want. Then, if you want to modify it, you basically have to prompt the AI to make changes. In the case of e.g. Gemini, once your session is done, you kind of have to start from scratch with the prompts. Hence

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      True, but we have seen this before, e.g. in the 5GL project some 35 years ago: Write the spec, the machine turns it into code. Know what happened after years of hype? A total resounding failure. Same as we will get here.

  • A lie by misdirection (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @10:15AM (#65920592)

    Linus trying something out in a "small hobby project" on a "trivial" difficulty level is not him "adopting" something.

    The LLM slop pushers really take any and all lies they think may keep the hype going a bit longer.

  • And even vibe building...

    You may not know what Vibe Building is, but it is the same as vibe coding, and vibe anything really, whether you decide to make some music, graphics or test some electronics theory on the fly, it's vibe, and it's fun.

    I do that with coding all the time. I remember I had an argument with some decent old coder from the old school, probably someone who has done coding all his life, he said that it takes more time to correct AI slop than to write correct code from scratch.

    I tend to agree

  • Vibe coding is nothing new. I am right now looking at some component that the newest, youngest member of our team wrote. They basically took some existing code that did something similar to what was needed, and modified it just enough to "just work". Lots of nonfunctional code: it executes (and eats how many cycles), but has no effect on the result. Some identifiers have not been renamed so as to remain meaningful. Also some crude tack-ons that are pretty hard to understand and don't follow the rest of the

  • I was very against AI coding, I've openly mentioned on Slashdot that I didn't tolerate AI coding in the past. That being said, I retract my previous views because it saves time! Why should I write another forEach loop in Typescript, or, template structs and struct functions in GO, when it's all boilerplate code?

    Other things I use it for, to generate GUI code, then, review the code, optimize it, and learn. What's the purpose of spending a week writing GUI code, to get to the same place I can be at after

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