Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/16/linus_torvalds_vibe_coding/?td=rt-3a

by pseudolus • 6 months ago

9 3 6 months ago

kevin42• 6 months ago

We recognize slop because it's slop. Just because a bunch of people are submitting slop to open source projects doesn't mean that AI can only generate slop.

His argument is basically a tautology "People who don't know how to code write bad code. Therefore, tools that help people who don't know how to code produce bad code"

pseudohadamard• 6 months ago

Vibe coding has its place. Some time ago I had to diagnose some strange memory behaviour in a VM, for which I could have either spent a lot of time reading manpages and not-quite-correct StackOverflow posts to find the correct commands and options I needed to track down the problem, or I could have asked Claude to do the legwork for me. I ended up solving, or at least seeing the cause of, the problem in minutes rather than hours.

Now, would I ask Claude to write the memory-allocator code that ran things in the first place? Hell no. But it was a very useful tool to use as a souped-up search engine that summarised the results and turn them into a bash script for me that displayed the info I needed.

Antitoxic6185• 6 months ago

What you describe is not really vibe coding.

Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea

Related Stories