Linus Torvalds Says AI Codes Better Than Him; Here’s What It Really Means x
Just as we thought Linux is the last place where vibe coding will come, we got news that Linus Torvalds is happily vibe coding and enjoying it. The creator of Linux and Git admitted AI writes better code than him. But the full story reveals something more nuanced about how experienced engineers should approach AI tools.
Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski. I’m a staff software engineer who has been coding for over 15 years without AI assistance. I build and scale products to millions of users. I’ve written extensively about vibe coding and recently published a book on the topic. I’ve seen the industry evolve from manual coding to AI-assisted development, and I have thoughts on what Linus’s move means for all of us.
For those who don’t know, Linus Torvalds is a Finnish-American software engineer who created Linux in 1991 and Git in 2005. He received the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize and is considered one of the most influential engineers in computing history.
Good eyes noticed that 5 days ago Linus made a commit in his project AudioNoise. AudioNoise is Linus’s side project for experimenting with digital guitar pedal effects — he describes it as “toy effects that you shouldn’t take seriously” where the main goal is learning about digital audio processing basics. The Python visualizer tool in this project was, as Linus admits, “basically written by vibe-coding.”
The commit suggests he used one of the emerging AI IDEs with this comment:
“It mostly went smoothly, although I had to figure out what the problem with using the builtin rectangle select was. After telling antigravity to just do a custom RectangleSelector, things went much better. Is this much better than I could do by hand? Sure is.”
