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.
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.
And from what I understand, they didn’t even reproduce the bug. They used the guys work to FIND the fucking bug, then reported it. That’s a real POS thing to do.
Read my post. I said “ruin a good thing” which very much is referring to that.