Linus Torvalds: Vibe coding is fine, but not for production
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: Linux inventor also discusses Rust in the kernel, Nvidia's proprietary code, and the problem of AI crawlers

Linux and Git inventor Linus Torvalds discussed AI in software development in an interview earlier this month, describing himself as “fairly positive” about vibe coding, but as a way into computing, not for production coding where it would likely be horrible to maintain.

Torvalds was interviewed by Dirk Hohndel, head of open source at Verizon, at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul, South Korea, earlier this month.

Torvalds is technical lead and maintainer of the Linux kernel, but said that “for the last almost 20 years, I’ve not been a programmer.” As for Git, which he invented, “I really just look at it from the side.”

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    129·
    16 hours ago

    Pretty reasonable take IMO

    I can see how it can be a useful tool to get people into dev

    You need to back that up with real learning though

    If you can’t/don’t review and completely understand every line of code you submit to a project yourself, you should not be surprised if the project owner tells you to take a long walk towards the Mariana trench

    • Sabata@ani.social
      9·
      11 hours ago

      I been vibe coding a Discord bot to teach myself Python. I’m finally good enough to get frustrated with the code the Ai gives me sometimes and do it myself.

      • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        5 hours ago

        good enough to get frustrated with the code the Ai gives me sometimes and do it myself.

        Good work. That’s a solid junior level understanding of code.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        32·
        9 hours ago

        Using LLMs as a semi-incompetent tutor is a good use. They know the basics well enough to explain it to you and have an idea of how to do the more complex stuff… but if you actually needed the thing done, you’d hire a professional.

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      11·
      12 hours ago

      As someone who is not a great coder. I can help in cases of double checking in addition to learning.

      I made a USB HID report & device descriptor, it works fine everywhere except it causes KDE settings Game Controller menu to segfault when identifying USB devices.

      I know there is a 99% chance that it is due to my descriptor being wrong. AI found my mistake of carrying over the logical min/max number of bits to the report size and my logical minimum was 1 too small. Haven’t had a chance to test yet, but maybe I saved the KDE maintainers annoyance of a false alarm bug report.

      • usrtrv@sh.itjust.works
        English
        1·
        18 minutes ago

        But sounds like there is still a bug, KDE settings shouldn’t segfault with malformed reports/descriptors. Might want to write a bug report or do PR yourself.