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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Linus Torvalds used vibe programming for a toy program.
- Vibe programming remains risky for serious projects.
- Linux developers have adopted AI tools for maintenance work.
Linus Torvalds has started playing with vibe coding. Yes, really! He’s using Google’s Antigravity AI assistant to generate parts of a new hobby project rather than writing all the code himself. In doing so, he has become the highest-profile programmer yet to adopt this rapidly spreading, and often mocked, AI-driven programming.
Mind you, Torvalds is not using this on the programs that made him famous, Linux and Git, or even his best-known hobby program, the diving program SubSurface. Instead, it’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.
Also: Linus Torvalds is ‘a huge believer’ in using AI to maintain code – just don’t call it a revolution
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?
For years, Stack Overflow was the go-to site for programmers wanting fast answers and code snippets to answer their technical questions. Now, AI chatbots such as Microsoft CoPilot, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek have largely replaced it among developers seeking quick fixes for programming problems.
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.
The vibe coding approach to software development
What’s vibe coding, you ask? Vibe coding is a software development approach in which programmers describe their requirements in natural language to an AI model, which then generates executable code. Unlike traditional AI pair‑programming tools that assume a human will read and refine every line, vibe coding often involves accepting the AI’s output largely as‑is and iterating by rerunning and adjusting prompts instead of editing code directly.
Major vendors now promote dedicated tooling for this workflow: Google offers “Vibe Code with Gemini” to turn ideas into shareable apps within AI Studio, while Antigravity builds on a fork of Microsoft’s VS Code via Windsurf to integrate conversational coding directly into the IDE. Advocates argue that this allows developers to focus on intent and product design while offloading boilerplate and low-level implementation details to AI.cloud.
Also: Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days – and never imagined it would last 20 years
This approach, however, can lead to enormous failures when applied to serious programs. Indeed, AI leader Andrej Karpathy, who coined the phrase “vibe coding” for just letting AI chatbots do their thing when programming, said, “It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects … but it’s not really coding — I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
That’s exactly what Torvalds did: He used it for a quick fix for a minor program. On the other hand, there’s the example of Jason Lemkin, a trusted advisor to SaaStr, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business community. The vibe program, Replit, he said, went “rogue during a code freeze, shut down, and deleted our entire database.”
Historically, Torvalds has been skeptical of hype‑driven shortcuts in software development, which makes his public use of vibe coding noteworthy. A widely shared post paraphrased him, joking that “vibe coding stands for Very Inefficient but Entertaining.”
That mix of sarcasm and pragmatism captures his stance: vibe coding can be “fun and very useful,” he suggests, but only when grounded in strong fundamentals rather than used as a crutch by those who do not understand what the code is doing. His decision to apply it in a non‑critical hobby context, and in a language where he is less confident, positions AI as a power tool rather than a replacement for expertise.
Also: Vibe coding feels magical, but it can sink your business fast – here’s how
Indeed, the Linux community has recently adopted AI for much of the scut work of maintaining code. As Torvalds said recently, while he still dislikes the AI hype: “I hate the whole subject of AI, not because I hate AI, but because it’s being such a hype word.” Nevertheless, he called himself “a huge believer in AI as a tool.”
With even Linux’s creator now experimenting with vibe programming, the debate over code quality, maintainability, and developer skills is likely to intensify. For many developers who have resisted AI‑generated code on principle, Torvalds’ candid endorsement for the right kind of project may be the nudge to at least try letting the “vibes” write a few functions.