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Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by cm0002@toast.ooo to c/linux@programming.dev

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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."

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[–] copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 42 points 1 week ago (13 children)

I can understand that way of thinking, but

you're at risk of becoming dependent, and not building the understanding you'll need to make something that matters
many things start out as hobby projects that end up mattering after all

Computers have become more complicated than when he learned to code and was "typing in programs from computer magazines." Vibe coding, he said, is a great way for people to "get computers to do something that maybe they couldn't do otherwise."

But the equivalent would be to take tutorials, examples and small open source projects and tinkering with them, rather than asking a machine to do it for you, no? I guess we'll have to see how this affects young / beginner programmers going forward. I'd rather be careful than just hoping it all works out fine.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago (10 children)

you’re at risk of becoming dependent, and not building the understanding you’ll need to make something that matters

Could be – and has been – said about literally any abstraction. Some people still haven't gotten over the fact that assembly is not the default system programming language anymore.

For me vibe coding is more akin to vbscript or MS Access. It's for people who neither know nor care about the "how" and don't give a shit about quality, performance, security, or maintainability (i.e. people who have no interest in software development). It's a market that's looked down upon for many good reasons, but it does exist and it does serve a purpose for small-scale and low-stakes DIY automation. Unfortunately that purpose is a lot narrower than the marketing pitch, nevermind all the other deleterious problems with the AI industry as it exists today.

[–] hikaru755@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (8 children)

literally any abstraction

Except vibe coding is not an abstraction in the way that word is usually used in the software context. Abstractions are deterministic. They may be leaky, but they can be fully understood and properly debugged if you have the skill. A chat bot that gives you a completely different result each time you give it the exact same task is something very different from that.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

I agree with all you said but it's still a (bad) abstraction.

By and large, the original market for VBScript or Cobol were people who did not have the means to understand - nevermind debug - their own output. Then actual professionals were hired to fix their broken pile of shit.

Vibe coding is arguably worse in many areas (such as determinism), but I'd argue it's a difference of degree not nature. The idea and target audience are largely the same, and the results will be as well, which is why I am not worried for my job security, quite the contrary.

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