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.
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)