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.
If I read it correctly, he used a LLM to help him write Python for a hobby project. I think this falls into an open minded, “who cares?”. Come back when he used it for something intended for public or commercial use.
He never would in critical code such as Linux kernel
I wouldn’t be so sure.
Pragmatically minded folks are not always concerned with the details of how something is done.
After all, he often uses code written by people other than himself in the kernel, he works to ensure those people are well clothed and fed, but that’s hardly the point of the linux project. The user experience is not so different from vibe coding.