Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

Perhaps the most famous low-level systems programmer has tried "vibe coding" for himself - and he seems to be enjoying it.

Linus Torvalds is best known as the leader of the Linux kernel project, the single biggest FOSS project. It's not the only thing he works on, though. A few days ago he revealed his latest side project, AudioNoise, which he describes as creating "random digital audio effects" using the "random guitar pedal board design" he unveiled last year. The README file contains something unexpected:

(Yes, some of us do use en/em-dashes in informal writing.)

We recently wrote about Torvalds' atypically subtle and nuanced position on the use of LLM bots in coding. It seems that the reasons have suddenly become a little clearer.

Google's Antigravity LLM has been winning other friends of late, including Register columnist Mark Pesce, who wrote that "vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software." Some other big names in the world of FOSS have also come out in favor of LLM coding assistants recently, including Redis creator Salvatore "Antirez" Sanfilippo, who wrote "don't fall into the anti-AI hype." Said hype is, of course, a subject about which Torvalds opined previously.

Torvalds' position has been more moderate, which is not entirely like his former self. He is famed for his outbursts at Nvidia, GitHub, third-party companies, and kernel contributors. We could go on, but you get the picture.

In an on-stage chat with Dirk Hohndel at the Open Source Summit Asia in November, he said that he was OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters. Adding Raspberry Pi-driven audio effects to his homegrown guitar pedal seems like a fair example.

Torvalds also has other hobby programming and electronics projects. Exactly one year ago as we write, The Register reported on his fondness for building guitar pedals. Another notable one is Subsurface, the SCUBA dive-logging software he co-wrote with the same Dirk Hohndel. As he told Divelog.blue in 2018, he and Hohndel are also diving buddies. As we have mentioned before, there are other things about Subsurface that you might not expect, such as that it uses Qt and C++.

Bootnote

It was some 25 years ago now, but "Just For Fun" is the title of Linus's 2001 autobiography, co-written with David Diamond - also known as the keyboard player from synthpop band Berlin. This vulture enjoyed the book, and there's a scan on the Internet Archive. ®