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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, the problem is, if everybody makes the same as you, what will happen to Libre Software? We will not have any alternative — and you’ll suffer from that too. In any rational sense, what you’re doing is a bad idea.
I’ve contributed to free software projects in some capacity or other since the 80s. I’ve done my bit. I don’t owe anyone anything.
But yeah you’re right: if AI turns every Tom, Dick and Harry like me away from computers, it’ll kill free software. Yeah it’s sad, but like I said, fuck computers. I don’t really give a turkey.
“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.
Nah that kid was just autistic.
These slop kiddies “sold out” in the way that every generation before them knew was categorically deplorable.
The real concern about younger generations isn’t just that they’re low key dumb af; it’s how conditioned they are to see the world as a lottery you win and not a challenge you overcome. An entire generation planning their life around capitalizing on their 15 minutes of fame and willing to be owned by whoever will give them a luxury dog house.
I feel like that last paragraph has been written about every generation in human history.
“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…
TheFlow already reported it but was keeping it silent for GTA VI and other game dumps and 14.0+ backports
Jordy literally fucked the entire community over for nothing
plot twist: some of the slop kiddies are sony employees that infiltrated the project.
That’s quite likely in fact. Wasn’t the xz case was one of infiltration too?
The problem is that AI empowers the biggest idiots
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.
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.
