Vibe-coding, the AI-assisted form of software development, is having a moment. Numerous companies are selling vibe coding services, Google just launched a vibe-coding agent, and it also happens to be the Collins Dictionary Word of the Year. However, at the very same time that this new development model has surged to prominence, numerous critics have noted that it poses all kinds of problems for the industry. Primarily, it can make mistakes that ultimately have to be fixed by a human developer who has to untangle why the code is the way it is in the first place.
One person who seems surprisingly cool with it is Linus Torvalds, the progenitor of Linux. During a recent open source software convention in South Korea, Torvalds expressed some cautious support for vibe coding, although he said he sees it more as a way for young coders to experiment with computing rather than a sensible way to go about developing corporate software products.
“Vibe coding may be a horrible, horrible idea from a maintenance standpoint, if you actually tried to make a product,” Torvalds said. “But I think it’s a great way…for new people to get involved and get excited about computers and get computers to do something that maybe they couldn’t do it, otherwise. So I’m actually fairly positive about this all.” That said, he scoffed at the people who “hope to make billion-dollar companies by just using vibe coding.”
In general, Torvalds seemed both hopeful and somewhat fatigued by the current wave of automation sweeping the software industry. “I see it as something exciting and something new and something good,” he said, while noting that people’s expectations may be out of alignment with reality. “We have people who are doing a lot of work in using AI to help maintainers deal with the flow of patches and backboarding patches to stable versions and things like that, but a lot of that is experimental,” he added.
“AI is just another tool,” the Linux creator went on. “The same way compilers free people from writing assembly code by hand, and increase productivity enormously, but didn’t make programmers go away,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the day when AI is less hyped and more the everyday reality that nobody talks constantly about,” Torvalds noted. “That’s clearly still a few years from now,” he said.
Vibe Coding has been generating a lot of chatter lately. Some see it as the gateway to a new evolution in software development, one that may fuel a new generation of startups. However, even the creator of vibe-coding has made it known that automated code just can’t cut the mustard in many settings. In general, it may be—like AI’s many other emergent services—a tool that is only somewhat helpful, and only part of the time.
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