Linus Torvalds Says Vibe Coding is Fine For Getting Started, 'Horrible Idea' For Maintenance

Linus Torvalds is 'fairly positive' about vibe coding as a way for people to get computers to do things they otherwise could not. The Linux kernel maintainer made the comments during an interview at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul earlier this month. But he cautioned that vibe coding would be a 'horrible, horrible idea from a maintenance standpoint' for production code.

Torvalds told Dirk Hohndel, head of open source at Verizon, that computers have become more complicated than when he learned to code by typing in programs from computer magazines. He said vibe coding offers a path into computing for newcomers. The kernel maintainer is not using AI-assisted coding himself. He said his role has shifted from rejecting new ideas to sometimes pushing for them against opposition from longstanding maintainers who 'kind of get stuck in a rut.'

Rust is 'actually becoming a real part of the kernel instead of being this experimental thing,' he said. Torvalds said AI crawlers have been 'very disruptive to a lot of our infrastructure' because they gather data from kernel.org source code. Kernel maintainers receive bugs and security notices that are 'made up by people who misuse AI,' though the problem is smaller than for other projects such as curl.

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