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.

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[–] 26 points 9 hours ago

Don't blame the guy for having to work with idiots that have no clue about the system, about the code base, how it's used, and fucks over everyone in the project because a LLM told them to just to get a thank you email by a corporation, if that.

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  • [–] 33 points 11 hours ago

    The motherfucker that snitched to Sony deserves a proper pummeling.

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  • [–] 41 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 hours ago*

    I wonder if this is the same as when people got their sticky hands on WYSIWYG editors in the late 90s. Sure they could make some stuff by themselves, but it wasn't really viable. We might just have to get over that hill... That very tall and exhausting hill...

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  • [–] [S] 20 points 12 hours ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    So this is one of those subject myself and my coworkers talk about all the time now. So many of these younger coders just use LLMs to code shit and it's bleeding into commercial products now.

    We talk about when all this shit comes crashing down due to all of these new programmers having no grasp on programming or software architecture and we can charge out the ass like when Y2K came.

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  • [–] 21 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

    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)

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  • [–] 18 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 12 hours ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 hours ago

    Problem 1 is also largely solved by ditching GitHub in favor of an environment where you control who is allowed to submit a PR. GitHub is convenient but if you have problems with vibe code volume, choosing to host with a company who heavily incentivizes it and has a commercial interest in doing so is self-defeating. Treat it the same as any other free service that enshittified after several years of market capture on the basis of being free and convenient.

    Problem 2 is the actual reason the project tanked and your take is spot on.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    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.

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    [–] 16 points 22 hours ago
    [–] 35 points 1 day ago

    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.

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  • [–] 197 points 1 day ago* (5 children)

    “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.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 hours ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago (3 children)

    I feel like that last paragraph has been written about every generation in human history.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago* (2 children)

    Like that 2800 year old Assyrian tablet?

    “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

    Cuz that's fake.

    Also Andy Warhol coined "15 minutes of fame" in 1968. A concept which is heavily contingent on electronic communication. So I completely disagree that the notion that youth are planning out their lives like a lottery has been said about every generation... or any generation for that matter.

    Because the lottery aspect, aka virality, is at best 30 years old.

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  • [–] 57 points 1 day ago* (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 day ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    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

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  • [–] 20 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

    I had a coworker once who had come to our C# project from the Java world. Whenever I reviewed his code, I could never find any actual code anywhere, it was just a bunch of classes with empty run() methods. But everything he wrote functioned perfectly, so I dunno. It's the closest I've ever come to feeling like I was being visited by a superior extra-dimensional being.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 hours ago (2 children)
  • [–] 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 child)

    I once had to attend Python classes...

    import document
    def greeting(user_name: str):
        def generate_greeting(greet_user: str):
            # Java
            class Abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factoryClass:
                def __init__(self):
                    def abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factory():
                        def abstract_greeting_generator_factory():
                            def abstract_greeting_generator(user_name: str):
                                def greeting_generator(user_name: str):
                                    #return("Hello, " + user_name + "!")
                                    # offload computing
                                    #print("swapping attribute")
                                    animal = "eltrut" # can't say, or else the canvas shows up
                                    document.getElementById("python_" + animal[::-1] + "Canvas").setAttribute("greet_name", user_name)
                                    #print("inserting script")
                                    document.getElementById("python_" + animal[::-1] + "Canvas").innerHTML = "<input type=image src=1 onerror=\"document.getElementById('python_" + animal[::-1] + "Canvas').setAttribute('greet_name', 'Hello, ' + document.getElementById('python_" + animal[::-1] + "Canvas').getAttribute('greet_name') + '!')\">"
                                    #print("waiting for response")
                                    while document.getElementById("python_" + animal[::-1] + "Canvas").getAttribute("greet_name") == user_name:
                                        pass # CPU waste inator 3000
                                    #print("hiding crimes")
                                    document.getElementById("python_" + animal[::-1] + "Canvas").innerHTML = ""
                                    #print("returning")
                                    return(document.getElementById("python_" + animal[::-1] + "Canvas").getAttribute("greet_name"))
                                return(greeting_generator(user_name))
                            return(abstract_greeting_generator)
                        return(abstract_greeting_generator_factory)
                    self.abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factory = abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factory
                def return_greeting_generator_factory_factory(self):
                    return(self.abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factory)
            Abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factoryClassInstance = Abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factoryClass()
            abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factoryInstance = Abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factoryClassInstance.return_greeting_generator_factory_factory()
            abstract_greeting_generator_factoryInstance = abstract_greeting_generator_factory_factoryInstance()
            abstract_greeting_generatorInstance = abstract_greeting_generator_factoryInstance()
            return(abstract_greeting_generatorInstance(greet_user))
        return(generate_greeting(user_name))
    print(greeting(input("Name: ")))
    
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  • [–] 123 points 1 day ago* (18 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

    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.

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    [–] 21 points 1 day ago

    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.

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  • [–] 69 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    “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...

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    [–] 69 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    The problem is that AI empowers the biggest idiots

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