Linus Torvalds is surprisingly optimistic about vibe coding – except for this one ‘horrible’ use

November 19, 2025 TH Author

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

Some developers don’t like Rust, but Linus approves of it becoming a mainstream part of the Linux kernel.
Torvalds thinks AI’s best use may be to help get young developers excited about programming.
Torvalds is pleased that AI has prompted Nvidia to become a significant contributor to the Linux kernel.

At the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Korea 2025, Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux and Git, joined longtime collaborator Dirk Hohndel, Verizon’s head of open-source programs, for a much-anticipated keynote discussion on Linux, Rust, and — because who doesn’t talk about it now — artificial intelligence (AI). The pair’s candid, conversational format delivered fresh insights into the evolution of Linux, current technology trends, and the ongoing resilience of the open-source community.

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Torvalds opened by reflecting on his role: “For the last almost 20 years, I’ve not been a programmer. I’m a technical lead and maintainer…all the real work is done by other people.” He emphasized the persistent need for maintenance, even as Linux matures: “Every single release has over 1,000 contributors, and that’s every two months,” Torvalds noted, highlighting how the project thrives on continuous improvements and adapts to hardware innovations.

He added, “As long as people continue to make new hardware, we will have more work to be done on the kernel side. But even without that, I’m somewhat surprised that, 35 years into the project, we’re still fixing up core kernel code and making things prettier and making them more maintainable and stable.”

From there, the tech pair talked about Rust’s ongoing integration into the Linux kernel. Torvalds acknowledged that Rust had “generated a lot of press” and internal debate, even leading some Linux maintainers to step down. Still, he defended the disruption: “It’s worth it…sometimes you need to encourage maintainers to be more open to new ideas.” The kernel community, he said, must balance stability with the need for evolution.

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AI’s impact on development

The conversation turned to AI’s impact on development. One of the nice parts about AI, Torvalds said, was “that it has made Nvidia into a good player in the Linux kernel space. Something that was famously not true 20 years ago.”

In those bad old days, Torvalds has said, “Nvidia has been the single worst company we’ve ever dealt with.” Those days are long gone. Today, Torvalds said, “Nvidia cares deeply about Linux, and we have a lot of kernel maintainers from that corner.”

AI itself continues to be a mixed blessing for Linux and open-source software. Torvalds observed on the plus side, “We have people who are doing a lot of work in using AI, to help maintainers deal with the flow of patches and backboarding patches to stable versions and things like that, but a lot of that is experimental.”

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He said that on the negative side, “AI has been very disruptive to a lot of our infrastructure. We have these AI crawlers that crawl all over the kernel’s source infrastructure, and that has been a huge pain and not always pleasant.” AI crawlers constantly hammering websites cost their owners a lot in compute and dollars.

Hondhel agreed and added that “Daniel Stenberg from cURL has talked about how the AI-generated slop security submission reports are almost a denial of service attack on his project.” Torvalids replied, “We have not seen it to that degree, but we do see bug reports and security notices that are clearly basically made up by people who misuse AI, and it does take resources away from maintainers.”

Hondhel continued that while he thinks of AI as “auto correct on steroids, because AI is fantastic at code completion, at helping you with syntax, and with standard libraries,” it’s not really ready to create working programs today.

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‘Not playing with it at all’

Torvalds replied that while he’s “not playing with it at all. I’m sure people are looking at it even for the kernel codebase. I suspect the kernel is insular and different enough that, despite us having a lot of code in the open that you can use, I don’t think a lot of people are doing vibe coding for the kernel.”

Instead, he said he thinks, “people are doing vibe coding for small, personal projects.” And he sees that as mostly a positive thing: “I just think of how when I grew up, with computers and reading magazines and typing in programs from computer magazines, but that’s how I got into computers. And I feel like computers have gotten so complicated. Your expectations of programming have gone so much higher that it’s much harder to get started these days than it was when I was young, and I got into computers, and I got excited about it.”

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Torvalds continued that while “I actually think that vibe coding may be a horrible, horrible idea from a maintenance standpoint, if you actually try to make a product for it, but I think it’s a great way for new people to get involved and get excited about computers that maybe they couldn’t do otherwise. And so I actually am fairly positive about this all.”

He concluded this line of thought by saying, “There’s some good and some bad. I’m looking forward to the day when AI is less hyped and more like the everyday reality that nobody talks constantly about, and that’s clearly still a few years from now.”

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Hohndel then pressed Torvalds on the IT industry’s recent layoffs that have been attributed by some to AI-driven productivity gains. Torvalds cautioned against premature conclusions: “You will need all the same maintainers to actually keep that project going.” He likened AI to compilers — they change how developers work, but don’t replace them.

The discussion concluded by considering lighter topics, as Torvalds admitted to a hobby of making guitar pedals, despite lacking musical and mechanical talent, embracing “failure as fun.” He urged other developers to find stress relief outside their core work: “If you have a stressful job, find a hobby where failure is not only expected, but fun.” The contrast between the simplicity of personal electronics projects and the complexity of the Linux kernel helps him relax, and he thinks it will also help others.