In a sign of the apocalypse, computing’s Mr Sweary, Linus Torvalds, has started fiddling with vibe coding.
According to ZDNet, Torvalds is using Google’s Antigravity AI assistant to generate chunks of a new hobby project instead of typing every line himself. That makes him the biggest name yet to be caught doing this rapidly spreading, frequently mocked, AI-driven programming.
Do not panic, though; he is not letting the bot anywhere near Linux or Git, and not even his best-known hobby work, the diving program SubSurface. He is keeping it boxed in with a small project called AudioNoise, a side quest in digital audio effects and signal processing.
AudioNoise followed his earlier hardware tinkering, in which he built physical guitar pedals as part of a project called GuitarPedal to learn about audio circuits. He has been handing those pedals out as gifts to kernel developers and, more recently, to Bill Gates.
Torvalds did the C parts the old-fashioned way, then leaned on Antigravity for a Python audio sample visualiser. He admits he uses online snippets when working in languages he doesn’t know.
For years, Stack Overflow was the default fix-it shop for developers hunting answers and copy-pasteable snippets. Now, AI chatbots like Microsoft CoPilot, ChatGPT and DeepSeek have muscled in as the quicker route to getting something that runs.
In the project README, Torvalds wrote that “the Python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding,” and explained how he “cut out the middle-man — me — and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualiser.” The point was not subtle because the AI output was good enough that he did not bother to redo it by hand.
Vibe coding, for anyone who has managed to dodge the term, is a workflow where you describe what you want in plain English and an AI model spits out executable code. The big twist is that you often accept the output largely as-is, then iterate by rerunning prompts rather than editing code line by line.
The vendors are already flogging tooling built around that loop. Google pushes “Vibe Code with Gemini” inside AI Studio, while Antigravity sits on a fork of Microsoft’s VS Code via Windsurf, baking conversational coding into the editor.
Fans say it lets developers focus on intent and product design while dumping boilerplate and low-level implementation onto the machine. The awkward bit is that “intent” does not debug segfaults, and “product design” does not stop you from shipping a mess.
Torvalds has spent years being allergic to hype-driven shortcuts, which is why seeing him publicly dabble is eyebrow-raising. A widely shared gag paraphrased him as saying vibe coding stands for Very Inefficient but Entertaining, which sounds like the sort of joke that lands because it is not a joke.
He is signalling that vibe coding can be “fun and very useful,” but only if you have the fundamentals to spot when the machine is confidently hallucinating. Used by someone who cannot read what they are running, it turns software into a roulette wheel with a Git repo attached.
