428
Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
428 points (98.6% liked)
Linux
10191 readers
695 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
I think that's a very valid point and I had to check my assumptions to see that you are largely right. However, I'm not sure your last sentence is necessary relevant, as the output of vibe coding is typically deterministic code, not code that is itself dependent on LLM (although that can happen as well but it can be considered as a special case).
Yes, but if you send the same promt to the same LLM n times, you'll get n different versions of the same thing.
When compiling the same C code (for example) with the same compiler and the same settings n times, you'll end up with n copies of exactly the same binary.
That's just a weird comparison though, why are you comparing implementation to compilation? If I ask you (or a cohort of developers) to implement the same thing, I will get different versions of the same thing.
The argument was about deterministic abstraction.
A bunch of devs can hardly be considered an abstraction layer imo.
My argument was that a C compiler is an abstraction tool that deterministically turns the description of a program (in the C language) into machine code. That way people don't have to write machine code by hand.
I get your argument just fine, and as I said I think you have a very credible and interesting point regarding the fact that LLM outputs are a nondeterministic abstraction. But if you consider LLMs as an abstraction in generating code, why not humans?? I don't see the principled distinction, as human devs are also code generators.
This is sensible in practice, since if someone needs to build something, they can either hire a dev or they can vibe code it themselves. Either way, they will end up with deterministic code (albeit perhaps very different quality depending on the code generator).