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.
Oh it's gotten so weird and depressing for me too. Like a lot of people I played with the free demo of GH Copilot when it came out in 2021. I was... not impressed for the most part. Its python suggestions were usually not any better than the standard Python analyzers, though every once in a while it would pop up a surprisingly decent function. Its C and C++ were either hilariously terrible or more likely just non-existent unless I was writing a textbook algorithm for some reason. Then it might be okish, maybe.
That fall, the company I was working for laid off my entire department, so I spent a few months looking for a job and ended up in management for a few years. The only code I wrote was a few hundred lines of Python to help me manage Jira tickets and I didn't bother setting up Copilot. I'm not sure if the company was paying for it. A couple engineers mentioned that they used it to do a couple of refactors, but nothing much seemed to happen with it.
Then, right about a year ago I changed jobs to go back to IC engineering at a company that had a strict no-AI code policy. In February I had a crazy work trip where I had three days to bring up some hardware that I had never touched before and script a demo for it. I pulled it off, after a couple of 3AM coding sessions in my hotel room. The C parts were straightforward, but the demo script was a damn mess of some of the worst Python I had written in a long time, due to the time pressure and the fact that I was writing it at 3AM.
Oh, but also in February the company softened its stance and was allowing AI coding assistance in some very limited ways as long as it fit into whatever our GH budget was. I knew that I would probably never touch the Python again as the real version was in process by someone else in Rust, but just in case I wanted it cleaned up. I figured it would take me a day or so after a good nights sleep to do it the right way. In the airport I asked copilot CLI to refactor my script, as a test, not expecting much.
Five minutes later it had refactored it into something much cleaner, properly using properties, and other such niceties. It wasn't perfect, there was a sign error in one equation, and there was still some minor cleanup to do but damn. It was good enough that if I was the reviewer I would have thought it was a good first pass and only had a few nits.
Since then we've all been given a decent LLM budget and told to use it as much as we want. I'm not being told I have to use it, but almost everyone is except for a few of us grey beards. And reviewing the code is terrible, because there is too much of it and it doesn't matter, I'm not actually teaching or working with anyone, just talking to someone who is talking to an LLM.
Due to some health issues that intermittently leaves me with too much brain-fog to really write code but clear enough to talk about my general knowledge and explain what I want to do, I'm tempted to use them to keep up. And when I do it's so disheartening. They have the judgement of a very junior engineer, but with perfect syntax in every language and documentation level knowledge of almost every subject. But they're just so damn fast at it. Previously, if I gave the kinds of instructions to a junior engineer, I'd expect to hear back from them in a day or three, with a passable first attempt and some interesting ideas to talk about. Now I hear back in five minutes with too much code and no reason to talk with them other than to give a few instructions to clean it up.