Linux and Git inventor Linus Torvalds discussed AI in software development in an interview earlier this month, describing himself as “fairly positive” about vibe coding, but as a way into computing, not for production coding where it would likely be horrible to maintain.
Torvalds was interviewed by Dirk Hohndel, head of open source at Verizon, at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul, South Korea, earlier this month.
Torvalds is technical lead and maintainer of the Linux kernel, but said that “for the last almost 20 years, I’ve not been a programmer.” As for Git, which he invented, “I really just look at it from the side.”
I can understand that way of thinking, but
But the equivalent would be to take tutorials, examples and small open source projects and tinkering with them, rather than asking a machine to do it for you, no? I guess we’ll have to see how this affects young / beginner programmers going forward. I’d rather be careful than just hoping it all works out fine.
I’ve found that using LLMs to research/summarize eases the friction of entering a new hobby and having to learn the tools, techniques, vocabulary, etc. You can just use Google (As an aside, nobody worries about how dependent we are on search) but the answer may not be in a answered in a way that is understandable to you or that fits into the context that you’re working with.
I’m going to RTFM eventually, but right now I need to figure out what the hell ‘Hello World’ means, who is World? Where do I type this text? What does compile mean?
Of course, none of this changes anything about the fact that it requires actual mental effort and problem solving in order to learn. LLM agents provide a new tool for people to use to avoid making that effort which can injure their own education, I can agree there. However, if deployed intelligently, they’re a useful tool/tutor if you can’t afford a, fairly incompetent, human expert in every field to be on call 24/7.
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.
Kids these days-- we oughtta return to scratching our code straight into the rock with a stick. /kids these days
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 agree with all you said but it’s still a (bad) abstraction.
By and large, the original market for VBScript or Cobol were people who did not have the means to understand - nevermind debug - their own output. Then actual professionals were hired to fix their broken pile of shit.
Vibe coding is arguably worse in many areas (such as determinism), but I’d argue it’s a difference of degree not nature. The idea and target audience are largely the same, and the results will be as well, which is why I am not worried for my job security, quite the contrary.
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.
From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not looking good…