There seems to be no stopping vibe coding, and some of the world’s most celebrated coders are getting on board.
Linus Torvalds, the legendary creator of Linux and Git, has openly embraced AI-assisted programming in his latest hobby project—and he’s remarkably candid about it. In the README for AudioNoise, a new repository focused on digital guitar pedal effects, Torvalds describes how he “cut out the middle-man” and used Google’s Antigravity AI coding tool to build a Python audio visualizer, replacing his usual approach of “google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do kind of programming.”
The admission is striking for its honesty. Torvalds, known for his exacting standards and occasionally acerbic takes on software development, describes himself as a “newbie” when it comes to Python and digital audio processing. Rather than laboriously searching for code snippets and piecing them together manually, he simply turned to Google’s AI to generate the visualization tool directly.
“It started out as my typical ‘google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do’ kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man — me — and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer,” Torvalds wrote in the project’s README.
The project itself is characteristically humble in its aims. AudioNoise is a continuation of Torvalds’ exploration of guitar pedal design, this time focusing on digital effects simulation while he “ponders the mysteries of life and physical user interfaces” following his work on an RP2354 and TAC5112-based hardware pedal. He’s quick to emphasize these are “toy effects that you shouldn’t take seriously,” designed purely as a learning exercise in digital audio processing basics.
The news caught the attention of Varun Mohan, who leads Google’s Antigravity project. “Truly an honor to see one of my programming heroes, Linus Torvalds, using Antigravity to build part of his most recent project,” Mohan said on X.
Torvalds’ casual adoption of AI coding assistance represents a notable data point in the ongoing debate about AI’s role in software development. If one of the world’s most respected programmers sees value in using AI to handle unfamiliar territory—in this case, Python visualization code for a hobby project—it suggests these tools have moved beyond the experimental phase into genuine utility. Former Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy, who’d coined the term ‘vibe coding’, is also saying that he’s regularly using AI to now write code.
The approach also highlights an emerging pattern in how experienced developers are integrating AI into their workflows: not as a replacement for expertise in their core domains, but as a way to rapidly prototype and explore adjacent areas where they lack deep knowledge. For Torvalds, that means generating Python code while he focuses on the digital signal processing concepts he’s genuinely interested in learning.
Whether this represents the future of software development or simply a pragmatic tool for side projects remains to be seen. But when Linus Torvalds openly admits to vibe coding with AI assistance, it’s a signal that the technology has achieved a level of legitimacy that would have seemed unlikely just a few years ago.