Iconic PlayStation hacker and homebrew developer Andy ‘TheFlow0’ Nguyen has abandoned the ongoing PS5 Linux project due to the rise of AI vibe-coders in open-source spaces.
Nguyen, who famously created the first kernel exploit for the PlayStation Vita, has spent over a decade creating exploits and homebrew for PlayStation systems. As one of the leaders behind the ongoing PS5 Linux project, which brought modern PC gaming to the console, the developer was also bringing the full Linux OS experience to Sony’s PS5 with miraculous results.
In an update on social media, the modder announced that they would be “stepping away from the PS5 scene” as well as ending their work on PS5 Linux. “After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and release in 2027, it’s all down the sink,” they said.
Nguyen, like many other homebrew developers recently, explained that they are ending the project due to the rise of AI vibe-coders in open-source spaces. Recently, brilliant PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 announced a ban on vibe coding participants due to the fact that vibe-coders in open-source spaces are submitting code that they do not actually understand.
In Nguyen’s words, “the scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don’t even understand”. Additionally, it seems that vibe-coders, or “slop kiddies” as the modder dubbed them, used AI to detect a bug that they were using to crack consoles, and reported it to Sony for a bounty.
“Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony,” the modder said on social media. “I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead.”
With this in mind, it seems that the progress on PS5 Linux for consoles on newer OS versions may have been ruined by the reporting of this bug. This means that the last version of PS5 Linux to be helmed by the modder is the currently available Version 2.5 which supports PS5 Phat and Slim console running 3.00-7.61 firmwares.
I’m exhauseted with AI and AI news. It’s why I had to leave Reddit. It has ruined everything that I enjoy.
The post that did it for me was some guy saying “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing but I had claude port sonic cd to the Saturn”
It’s just endless hyperdrive of slop. Everyone is a “coder” now. It’s sad.
The post that did it for me was some guy saying “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing but I had claude port sonic cd to the Saturn”
These guys are everywhere. Someone on Vogons recently “ported” Terminator Future Shock from DOS to the Godot Engine.
The project is mostly useless and full of bugs. He also didn’t disclose that he used AI at all. I wonder what he expected - praise? This feels similar to the cheaters in speedrunning, they often shower in praise for years until they get caught.
I hope that projects like these finally die down when the big LLM companies go down the drain and they can’t run hundreds of agents in a datacentre without actually paying the money anymore.
It makes no sense, either busineswise or personally, for a very senior domain expert to waste most of their time reviewing the “work” produced by the equivalent of the a veritable army of the most junior dev imaginable blindly running random code generators to produce tons of low-value “code” and, worse, junior devs that will never fucking learn no matter how much feedback you give to them.
An overabundance of noobs is historically the reason why high level experts just stop reading and giving feedback in general subject forums - it gets really old really fast to constantly have to repeating the same basic lessons for junior level people, many who didn’t even try to learn the basics from widelly available information out there.
Now imagine the same problem only the “junior” people in question are significantly more clueless (clueless zero-knowledge amateurs, so less than junior), don’t even know they have a problem and basically use text generators to produce walls of code.
I suspect it’s like the problems in expert Usenet groups that gave rise to using FAQs as solution and the good old Read The Fucking Faq (RTFF) response to noob questions, only 100s of times worse.
There is literally no point in engaging with slop kiddies.
(The extra sad thing in this case is how the only way to protect from slop kiddies using their slop tools to trawl the homebrew code for the hack used to go around Sony’s blocking and snitching it to Sony for $$$ is to keep that code closed. In a way, this is quite similar to what’s happening in Mathematics with AI were if a scientist reports on their progress to prove some theorem, somebody might very well use the AI to plagiarize what they’ve done so far and jump from there into producing a programatical “proof” which doesn’t actually come with the theoretical underpinning explaining why and how it works)
As someone who frequently uses open source software but doesn’t code much, the prevalance of this kind of attitude is very concerning.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the maintainers feel the way they do, I’m just worried that all the software I’ve come to rely on will slowly become abandoned because of it.
I’m getting a new job soon that pays more, gonna put some money every month into supporting maintainers of the software I use financially going forward, starting with the more obscure stuff. hopefully that helps ease the burden.
I think we have two different problems here:
- One is overload of the domain experts with having to review and integrate huge amounts of low quality “contributions” from people who are de-facto sub-junior in terms of domain expertise. This can be mostly solved by refusing such contributions.
- People using AI tools to trawl through the homebrew code to find out the mechanism using to go around Sony’s blocking and then snitching it to Sony. As I see it, the only way to solve that is to close source the code, ideally just part of it if they can make sure that even indirectly that mechanism is not leaked (which can be pretty hard if you’re trying to hide that, for example, certain something has to be executed at a specific point during code execution).
For other code bases which aren’t trying to bypass certain locks, the second problem doesn’t apply, though the first definitelly does to all open source projects with open contributions.
Vibe-coders (actually probably will steal “slop kiddies”) ruin a good thing yet again.
I turn to retrocomputing to get away from it all because I would expect people in that world to generally agree this is horrible and there’s somehow vibe-coding there too. I’m so tired of this.
Read the article. He’s not complaining about slop, he’s complaining that the community found a PS5 bug and Sony fixed it, throwing a wrench in his project.
His expectation that a gamer community would just collectively keep a hypervisor exploit secret from Sony is ridiculous. Of course they found out…
It’s kinda both, ‘slop kiddies’ discovered what took him months of effort through extensive knowledge and expertise.
But yeah most of the replies here are just assuming this is a similar case to OSS developers leaving projects when they’re inundated and frustrated with endless garbage contributions to projects.
I’ve said this many many times, but lowering the skill floor for tasks inevitably drops the average quality down. Mathematically provable even.
There’s a reason a lot of the tech made in the 50s/60s/70s/80s was amazing because it was made by the brightest of minds whereas the everday person didn’t have the skills to get over the floor. Think moon landing, xerox, and many other analog systems.
There used to be barriers for entry into these spaces that would ensure effort is done to participate, with low effort garbage being filtered by the minimum impetus. Now that writing code can be “effortless” you end up with a lot more garbage there is no filter for. Same for all skillsets impacted by AI. Graphic design being another big one that comes to mind.
To save you a click and strip all of the anti-AI circle jerking for people who actually want to understand what happened:
Another user discovered the hypervisor exploit that TheFlow0 was using and turned it in for bounty money. Without a working hypervisor bypass exploit, the project is moot.
I bet the way they “discovered” the hypevisor exploit was to use the LLM to trawl through TheFlow0’s code for it …
Same think can be done manually, but you need to have quite a lot more expertise and invest far more time to do it manually.
“used AI to detect a bug that they were using to crack consoles, and reported it to Sony for a bounty.”
Wow, what a fucking loser. This was probably the kid who reminded the teacher that they forgot to assign homework.
I think it’s telling that llama.cpp, the interface engine for LLMs on desktops, has blanket banned vibe coded PRs, as they simply cannot deal with them with the manpower they have.
…An LLM inference project. Banning LLM vibe coding.
I remember a collective groan from the devs when Google’s TurboQuant paper trended on Twitter, and they knew there’d be a flood of Claude PRs to “implement” the feature, even though most of it already existed in the engine.
vllm (the premiere enterprise server inference engine) is quite careful about them too, though they use bots to filter them and have more manpower to cull what slips through.
At my job, its extremely clear when someone used an llm to write their code, mainly because they change 250+ lines at a time and the code exists somewhere else in a more efficient form. Honestly most of my code reviews have been rejected with an existing library cited.
I hate AI.
I’ve heard some variety of “programmers like writing code more than reading it”
I can only imagine what it’s like to remove the former and pile on heaps more of the latter
It sucks ass. I barely even want to / care to read my coworkers code. It used to be nice to read the way one person writes their code, having their own way about things. Now it’s all the same shit.
Why the hell would you even search for an report that bug? Surely there are better bug bounties to be had…
That aside, by all means, use AI if you want to, but don’t spam FOSS projects with it like wth. If you want to use AI, check the projects policy first, and if they permit it, look at the code you generated, test it and declare that you used AI so the maintainers are aware.
And please don’t try to contribute code to anything if you don’t know shit about coding. Nobody needs your help to write a prompt. I don’t know where people get the idea that anyome needs them to tell an AI what to do. If I could just tell an AI and be done with it, I would fucking be done with it.
I’ve abandoned all my open-source projects too. I’ve gotten a lot of PRs lately, and each time I look, it’s bad AI-generated code that I never want to merge.
That and I don’t even see the point of maintaining finely-crafted handmade code in that sea of mediocre fast-paced slop. It’s just not fun and I’m not interested anymore.
Ive had some luck running on codeberg. Reduces the AI slop on some of my popular libraries by a huge percentage. I also have a mirror on my own server but thats more for my own usage.
That’s totally understandable. I still write software for myself, but for now I don’t put it on Github anymore. It’s just for me, to learn new tools, improve myself and have fun.
I don’t want to deal will all this nonsense. My contributions to OSS projects have extremely gone down, largely due to lack of motivation.
I’ll still write public code here and there, but only if there’s no sign of AI. For example, I contributed to Tracky this year, which is a PHP application for tracking movies and TV shows.
If I have ai fix something I just make a bug report telling them what I had ai fix for myself, I don’t push it for anyone else and update to the actual version when they fix the bug correctly
Honest question
Do you find that with a small number of trusted devs driving Codex or Claude, you can get done as much or more than you were when the public was submitting handcrafted PRs?
I use AI at work. Not “vibe coding” or anything: I use it locally on a DGX Spark machine to answer simple technical questions and spew out boilerplate. I admit it’s really useful, and I work quite a bit faster.
But here’s the thing:
There’s no effort required to do anything anymore. It makes all achievements bland.
It means my 40 years of experience are pretty much worthless, when anybody can ask an LLM what it took me decades to master.
We go through the motions at work: someone makes a PR and asks for code review. Someone else reviews the code and then it’s merged.
But here’s what really happens: more often than not, the guy requesting a PR asked AI to make the code. The guy reviewing the code asks AI to review the code. And if those two talk to one another, in the background, they pass each other’s questions to their individual LLMs.
And you can tell nobody really understands what the LLMs have done when you start asking them detailed questions about the code: they start blurting out nonsense, vague explanations of what they “did”, before eventually admitting that they don’t fully understand it and they asked AI to do it.
In other words, the (shoddy) work is done by machines, and the human workers are just proxies. It’s a simulacrum of humans working together. It’s really bizarre, it’s utterly absurd and it’s insulting to those of us still trying to do the work ourselves. I don’t want to review machine-made code, especially when some guy asks me to do it without telling me he didn’t do the work himself. Fuck that!
And the worst is, I’m the first to recognize that I can’t continue to work at the pre-AI pace I used to work, even though I am a fast human worker: I’m completely outclassed by the machines. They create bad code but they do it fast, and most of my colleagues are completely happy with good-enough shit they don’t understand.
Hell, one even asked me the other day why I keep bitching about the code being commented and readable when nobody reads it anymore, and AI can read the code and produce summaries. That’s… bleak.
And it’s so easy it’s like cocaine: you know AI is bad for code quality, but you can’t help doing it, because it’s quick and lazy.
I’m not built for this. I hate it with a passion. It feels like being a great horse-drawn buggy driver in the age of automobiles: I know my skills have been obsoleted and I’m about to be completely washed out. I could transition and start driving cars - and to an extent, I have already. But I just don’t wanna. Driving cars is not fun, it’s not exciting, it’s not challenging, it’s boring and it’s utterly depressing.
So I don’t code for myself anymore. What’s the point… I could do it pre-AI stylee, but then I’d be very slow, and I’d have to refuse contributions - because all contributions are AI slop, or very nearly so nowadays. And eventually I’d be tempted to use AI in my projects anyway, and I have too much pride in the quality of my code to do that - not to mention, I have to use the damn technology enough during work hours as it is.
I’ve informed my boss that I would like to transition to another position in the company. I love my company, I love the folks I work with, and I used to love what I do. But AI ruined everything in the space of less than 2 years. Now I fucking hate dragging my ass to the office every morning, and I relish the days when I have to spend time in the workshop machining parts, away from fucking computers.
Luckily, I’m senior enough and respected enough that I can request a radical change in role without being thrown out for being unreasonable. And my boss understands why I hate AI. But at my age, it’s not gonna be fun to change job completely once more. I was really hoping to retire quietly doing what I do now.
Anyway, long story short, and to answer your question: it’s not a matter of trusted devs or the tools they use: I want nothing to do with computers anymore. If it was up to me, I’d be machining parts in a blue overalls all day every day until I retire. Fuck computers.
“don’t be a meat proxy” https://meatproxy.me/
This comment and all the responses to it so far are super cathartic. The cherry on top of all of this is the constant impression that, no, you’re the crazy one. So not being entirely alone is nice.
Same brother, same. I’m retiring the end of this year. I transitioned from a dev, to contract work, to now a contract code reviewer. I’m sick of it. I get paid to go to random startups or other companies to review code, explain to them why it doesn’t work because they don’t know WHY it’s not working, and when I tell them they thank me for my time and keep doing it. And they all lie about it. They’re all using AI for end to end builds but they simply continue to lie that THEY built it until after you consistently prod them they admit “yeah I had Claude build it, I don’t know how it works”. It’s like dealing with a drug addict like you said. You know they’re doing it, everyone around them knows, and yet they won’t admit it.
So i’m done. Even with the FOSS projects I work on I’m done because now you’re getting PRs from randos using omarchy they think they can now contribute to projects and when you review their shit they can’t explain what they did, why they did it, or why they’re even submitting it.
I’m totally done. I’m done with any type of code. the past 2 years have killed the past 25+ years of passion I had for this stuff. It’s not fun anymore and I feel like I wasted half my life.
Oh it’s gotten so weird and depressing for me too. Like a lot of people I played with the free demo of GH Copilot when it came out in 2021. I was… not impressed for the most part. Its python suggestions were usually not any better than the standard Python analyzers, though every once in a while it would pop up a surprisingly decent function. Its C and C++ were either hilariously terrible or more likely just non-existent unless I was writing a textbook algorithm for some reason. Then it might be okish, maybe.
That fall, the company I was working for laid off my entire department, so I spent a few months looking for a job and ended up in management for a few years. The only code I wrote was a few hundred lines of Python to help me manage Jira tickets and I didn’t bother setting up Copilot. I’m not sure if the company was paying for it. A couple engineers mentioned that they used it to do a couple of refactors, but nothing much seemed to happen with it.
Then, right about a year ago I changed jobs to go back to IC engineering at a company that had a strict no-AI code policy. In February I had a crazy work trip where I had three days to bring up some hardware that I had never touched before and script a demo for it. I pulled it off, after a couple of 3AM coding sessions in my hotel room. The C parts were straightforward, but the demo script was a damn mess of some of the worst Python I had written in a long time, due to the time pressure and the fact that I was writing it at 3AM.
Oh, but also in February the company softened its stance and was allowing AI coding assistance in some very limited ways as long as it fit into whatever our GH budget was. I knew that I would probably never touch the Python again as the real version was in process by someone else in Rust, but just in case I wanted it cleaned up. I figured it would take me a day or so after a good nights sleep to do it the right way. In the airport I asked copilot CLI to refactor my script, as a test, not expecting much.
Five minutes later it had refactored it into something much cleaner, properly using properties, and other such niceties. It wasn’t perfect, there was a sign error in one equation, and there was still some minor cleanup to do but damn. It was good enough that if I was the reviewer I would have thought it was a good first pass and only had a few nits.
Since then we’ve all been given a decent LLM budget and told to use it as much as we want. I’m not being told I have to use it, but almost everyone is except for a few of us grey beards. And reviewing the code is terrible, because there is too much of it and it doesn’t matter, I’m not actually teaching or working with anyone, just talking to someone who is talking to an LLM.
Due to some health issues that intermittently leaves me with too much brain-fog to really write code but clear enough to talk about my general knowledge and explain what I want to do, I’m tempted to use them to keep up. And when I do it’s so disheartening. They have the judgement of a very junior engineer, but with perfect syntax in every language and documentation level knowledge of almost every subject. But they’re just so damn fast at it. Previously, if I gave the kinds of instructions to a junior engineer, I’d expect to hear back from them in a day or three, with a passable first attempt and some interesting ideas to talk about. Now I hear back in five minutes with too much code and no reason to talk with them other than to give a few instructions to clean it up.
Dude, are you me? You said every sentence I wanted to say.
I fucking hate this AI too. In my (huge) company they’re forcing us to use AI and treating the usage of token as a metric of performance. Say, I’m smart like Peter Parker and can move my fingers as fast as The Flash, I can still get a bad grade because I wrote the code myself.
I just love programming. I secretly enjoy doing my job not only for money. At least I used to. If I had a billion dollars I can give every one a middle finger and continue to work the way I like until they kick me out. But I am not rich in reality. I still need to feed myself and my family, and I’m too old to start over my career also too far from retirement.
One day I questioned the PR which was raised by a colleague. I can tell immediately that he proxied LLM output to the comment to answer my question. I empathized him, for one thing, that he was forced to work on this part of the project where he didn’t understand much just because the management “converted” every one of us to be a “full stack engineer” due to AI-empowerment, and second, he was really overwhelmed by the new workload, again, due to AI-empowerment.
This is shit, man. In the old days, raising a PR you don’t understand equals to showing every one else that you’re an idiot, a shameless, ignorant idiot. But not anymore today. We’re welcomed to do anything with AI. Low quality? Oh that’s because you “didn’t use AI properly”. Upper management or high ranked “engineers” will show you a demo in a Zoom meeting how they "HARNESS"ed AI to generate their shopping list. “Look? It’s 100% correct, so evidently you shall be able to accelerate your speed of work to 1000%.”
Project tech leads apparently focus on quality. Oh, I mean quality of their promotion rate. “If it compiles, if it passes the test (also AI-generate), ship it! What readability? What logic? The fuck you’re taking about? This code is Good Enough™!” We don’t need to understand the code. We’re discouraged to understand the code. Oh, but publicly they will stress, “AI is just a tool and you need to fully understand what your submitting.” And they still come after you when the AI-generated code fails in production.
I also have decades of coding experience, but now it looks worthless. It’s worthless at its face value: the corporation is no longer willing to pay for it. AI stole every answer on Stack Overflow, and now it spits out code that looks as if it’s written by a human. It’s good enough to them. Nobody wants the code perfect anymore.
It’s a crime against human intellect.
And there are jobs better fit in the tide of AI-replacement: doctors. Doctors have a worklog that’s of even higher quality for AI to train on. And if AI can generate correct boilerplates for silly requirements, AI can diagnose most everyday sickness.
Hey, don’t point fingers at me. I’m just trying to talk like AI bros. I swear to god if they don’t take legal liability in misdiagnosis, they will push AI doctors in hospitals.
Yes, they don’t take legal liability in business software. “Who cares?” All they will ever face is few of us who do know their crime, and the non existent class action.
Humanity looks pretty grim. I don’t fucking know how I’ll survive the world with greedy capitalists with the most powerful robbing tool by far.
Stop fishing bro. We hate it. The concept sucks. The real world effects suck. The code is mediocre.
At my current job the offered me a promotion from call center to Testing/QA. Paid very well. Turned it down twice, held out for the actual analyst job.
Why would I like a thing that takes the fun out of the thing I like? Because I can wOrK fAsTeR?
You’re just horny for cash like every other brainrotted cynical piece of shit in this godforsaken country and you are trying to justify your position to yourself.
“used AI to detect a bug that they were using to crack consoles, and reported it to Sony for a bounty.”
Wow, that’s literally “McDonalds burger flipper who narc’d on Luigi” level of stupid. And they are likely about to obtain the same amount of prize…
plot twist: some of the slop kiddies are sony employees that infiltrated the project.
The problem is that AI empowers the biggest idiots
And the smallest idiots too
And the medium sized idiots.
There’s more idiots than not, really.
these idiots think they’re helping (or rather, they want recognition without doing any work) but they’re basically just creating virtual asbestos. turning in that bug bounty was especially heinous.
i was considering getting a PS5 purely for the linux stuff but i guess not now. not that i had PS5 money anyway, even gently used…
turning in that bug bounty was especially heinous.
witnessing that would’ve been the end of the project for me, too.
Yeah, I can’t imagine being an open source developer for a popular program these days. They get absolutely flooded with slop, constantly. I wouldn’t be surprised if it somehow makes open source die, or at least go into the shadows.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the goal.
To be honest though, it’s not gonna happen. It may kill GitHub eventually, but AI slop isn’t really much of a problem on platforms that don’t actively promote and sell it (e.g. Codeberg/Forgejo).
Devs will just migrate their projects off of GH; some already have. FOSS is too strong a movement to be killed by the corporate bullshit machine.
Personally the faster github dies, the better.
Don’t forget they’re also taking our hardware and making it so expensive that the only viable option for most people will be a tablet with 4GB ram and 128GB storage.
“Don’t worry! You can save all your important documents and play all your favorite games on the cloud! Just look at our security certified App Store!”
They don’t ever want us to see source code again.
There’s the other side too, though.
People who never had the time to maintain the projects they created ages ago, because the projects make little to no money in donations so they have full time jobs. Some of them have resorted to LLMs because nobody else is stepping up (and can you even trust randos to take over stewardship of your project? Remember Jia Tan!) and now catch hate for that, when previously they caught hate for not getting enough done.
I previously never made any of my projects open source because I just wouldn’t have time to maintain them anyway. Now I could ease the workload with AI, but I’d rather not deal with either end of the AI issue: I don’t want people sending random ass pull requests and bug reports that clearly haven’t been reviewed by a human that knows what’s up, and I don’t want to catch a bunch of hate for using LLMs myself. Not a big loss for the open source community either way, the things I’ve created are fairly niche tools that you can just pay to get proprietary alternatives that would usually work better, having been in development for longer, by larger teams. Most people won’t need them at all though.
