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 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.
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.
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.