r/pcmasterrace • u/Wargulf • 28d ago

News/Article PS5 Linux lead quits as open-source projects have become “a bunch of noobs using LLMs” that “they don’t even understand”

https://frvr.com/blog/news/ps5-linux-lead-quits-as-open-source-projects-have-become-a-bunch-of-noobs-using-llms-that-they-dont-even-understand/
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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

I used an LLM to write some lines of code for a small electronics project (energy meter for an ebike).
It's useful for that application. I cannot write such code. However, I could read the code it spit out and could reasonably understand what the code was doing.

It's not useful for code that you want to publicise. Why the hell would you send unchecked AI generated code to an open source project?

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u/Edwardteech i712k 3090 32gb ddr5 28d ago

But it compiled on the first try.

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u/TheTresStateArea 28d ago

An energy meter isn't an operating system

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u/nanotree 28d ago

And a compiler doesn't test operational functionality across every domain and scenario that a complex open source system used by millions of people is expected to function within.

LLMs have turned non-coders into people who think machines can do the work of engineers. They don't understand the difference between code and design. Or the relationship between code and architecture. Or the relationship between architecture and industry standards. All of that gets erased because "I had a really good idea for a feature and had an LLM build it out and it worked!". No discipline in decisions. No careful deliberation of naming conventions. And the LLM doesn't understand the design, just the context it statistically computes is relevant to the immediate task is used to generate statistically relevant content based on your prompt. That's it. It's statistics all the way down.

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u/Veggies-are-okay 28d ago

TL;DR there is a skill gap with AI usage and it sucks that it’s both noobs to computer science AND AI that are ruining it for the rest of us. It’s supposed to replace your fingers, not your brain!

I mean yes do not one shot but there is a grey area here. I use LLMs to drill into specs and clarify all those things that you mention. Naming conventions is a trivial thing to build into the workflow. Give it a bulletproof list of jira-style tickets and an mcp server to GitHub and you can get a very solid and well-documented project.

My workflow got me my job. I had the best solution to their exercise (albeit admittedly not very difficult at all… optimizing a backend to make an ml model realistically scalable/deployable). Took an hour of chatting with Claude and boom off to the races. Took less than an hour to get the 10 PRs in and reviewed.

Now you may absolutely complain about having to extensively review code you did not manually write. I like to round-robin a few writing style based skills so that there’s some variety in syntax style. It’s pretty neat.. I’ve even gotten to the point where I request little grammar errors so I feel like it’s coming from a human 😅

I’m one of the minority that is more attracted to the high level meta of prompting self-checking systems and finding reusability there than the rote boilerplate coding. Watching a system play with jira tasks and have agents interacting is kind of magic. It’s like being the manager of little workers that listen to every directive like a monkey paw.

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u/bastiVS PC Master Race 28d ago

It actually is supposed to replace your brain. And its partially already there.

The "partially" however is the problem. Any AI can still spit out the most insane nonsense, so you still need to have an idea of what the AI was supposed to be doing to spot when it didn't do that.

Lots of people dont get that, but are trying to use AI to make a quick buck by flooding everything with shit apps that will never recieve any proper support.

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u/MCRN-Gyoza 28d ago

Honestly most of the problems people say they have with AI generated code just comes from not knowing how to use the AI.

It's hilarious that there are some people in this thread who think they are better at coding than LLMs while working their shitty job at a legacy non-tech company, meanwhile high level people in big tech and academia all admit they don't write code anymore because the model does a better job at that than they do.

It's the epitome of Dunning-Kruger.

The only thing better are the people who go on a pedantic tirade about how it's just autocomplete or not really intelligent. Who the fuck cares? I care that it makes my job 10x easier.

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u/fell_ware_1990 28d ago

It’s not really a problem. I do use a lot of AI, but i can also explain what my code does, why it fails, what should be different.

I have a ‘new’ senior developer coworker, the first 2 months i gave him the benefit of the doubt, after that i knew he sucks. He can’t verbally explain the tiniest bit of code. Can’t do git, i ended up with PR’s which started with 5 commits go to 50 and the code went back and forth. Told him to sqaush, PR removed > recreated.

Just this week he managed to upload his whole AI workflow, even that really sucks…..50 skills, random orchestration agent, MCP’s all over the place. And then only about 10% even matched the file type, even less matched our preferences and such.

He was suddenly getting more done, so i checked his usage. Trough the roof, 30/35k agent starts, complete orchastration flows, 10 commits and only a i think 50 LO(c) cause half is still .md . So i didn’t bother, send out a deepseek with a harness. Basically all code was wrong, so i checked by hand and it was right.

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u/Veggies-are-okay 28d ago

I think it’s important to learn when you’re veering into the realm of “vibing.” I was concerned about this until I 100% vibed out my first complex react app as a backend data science guy. That feeling of “this is cool but I can’t really say anything about it” is worlds different than imposter syndrome on rapid progress. I always tap into that feeling as a litmus of slowing down/taking a break from computer work. Glaze-y eyes means finish up the task and go touch grass.

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u/fell_ware_1990 28d ago

Yeah, well i’m a DevOps guy. So i manage complex infra, kubernetes, openshift, iac and a lot more.

99% is done in code. So i also use AI a whole lot, for all kinds of different stuff. But i won’t let it build or touch a very important module with my git keys wide open ( as he does ).

I have a complete system around it, red build? It notifies my system, it starts collecting the logs, identical pipelines, checking knowledge RAG, tickets, creates a new ticket with all the information. Hit’s up an other agent picked by the ticket subject ( one of the many specialized agents ) > Creates an isolated space, gets a few specific tools, cant commit. For most part’s of the repositories there are guidelines, rules, hooks, linters ( partially custom made so it handles it how i want ) .

The end result could be 2 things, i get code delivered i can review or i at least get a suggestion what’s happening or that it is a big change that needs planning.

Worst comes to worst i at least have a very up to date ticket complete with everything i need. Best case, the code’s good. I approve, it already created a commit + PR message, tooling tracks PR down to a green build in PRD.

So i am really pro AI, it saves me a lot of time. But dumping a few skills in, burn tokens, dont know what you create….yeah well….

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u/fell_ware_1990 28d ago

Don’t forget the amount of people that heard they should secure their code and do!

Then they all host it on a local machine with the front door wide open. I have seen the best thought out security patches, by checking a 100 hashes for 1 interaction but a simple SQL injection block? Never heard of that.

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u/Tuomas90 28d ago

It works on my AI.

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u/Axthen 9800X3D/4090/32gb@6000 28d ago

Absolutely! Who would be dumb enough to publish unchecked AI generated code???

Looks at windows.

Oh.

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u/Wise-Dust3700 28d ago

Took three comments this time to get through a linux topic before windows was mentioned x'D

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u/dookarion 28d ago

They deserve the shade considering every other update fucks a bunch of shit up.

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u/trash-_-boat 28d ago

I hope you don't sincerely think that they put in production unverified AI generated code and you're just spitting hyperbole.

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u/Axthen 9800X3D/4090/32gb@6000 28d ago

If it's 'checked' that's even more embarrassing.

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u/Nemphiz 28d ago

Looks at windows literally every major company out there including FAANG.

Fixed that for ya

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u/Flori347 28d ago

I did the same for a small cosplay related project. But I ended up learning to code properly in the end because the AI output never really worked like I wanted it to.

But I still ask about errors or simple things when I'm stuck, sort of like a souped up google.

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u/PrettyBaker2891 Arch 28d ago edited 28d ago

did u guys even read the article? lmfao

the lead dev isnt mad about unchecked code being pushed to his open source project

the guy is mad because "unskilled" people used AI to find a working ps5 exploit and reported it to sony to claim a bug bounty

which is funny as fuck ngl and probably just cope from the lead dev guy. dude is lashing out at ai for no reason

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u/SOSpammy iMac 2017 i5-7500, Radeon 570 Pro, 32GB DDR4 28d ago

Even the article itself tries to mislead you into believing it's about vibecoders contributing to open source projects. It doesn't mention the real reason he's mad until the end of the article.

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u/PrettyBaker2891 Arch 28d ago

yup

gotta clickbait and farm engagement from all the anti ai people

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u/Fox-Flimsy 28d ago

Well after reading the article, he’s mad because that was the only exploit he had left to actually run linux on the PS5, basically ruining the whole project. So yes he’s mad at the AI kiddies for basically taking advantage of the code reviewer to make a quick buck.

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u/thesniper_hun 9070XT/7800X3D/32GB DDR5/1080p@240hz 28d ago

I doubt he wouldn't have ragequit if it was instead reported by a person who didn't use AI to find it lol

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u/SOSpammy iMac 2017 i5-7500, Radeon 570 Pro, 32GB DDR4 28d ago

And the overall message is so contradicting. "AI is worthless and can only contribute useless broken code to the project, but also AI found a zero-day exploit that's essential to the project."

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u/GregBahm 28d ago

You're downvoted as of this writing because the thread is full of clickbaited anti ai people who are proud of it

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u/TheTresStateArea 28d ago

If you read the article then you'd know that he didn't report the exploit. The article suggests that he needed the exploit to stay for continued development.

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u/PrettyBaker2891 Arch 28d ago

???????

i never said he reported the exploit. i said other people did. thats why he is mad. he is mad because other people reported the exploit.

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u/TheTresStateArea 28d ago

Sorry I wasn't clear, he didn't report the exploit because he needed it, and someone else did. So yes, he is mad. But not because someone beat him to the punch.

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u/DefinitelyNotMasterS 28d ago

Nobody claimed he is mad because someone claimed the bounty before he did

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u/alexnedea 28d ago

No hes mad that someone "less skilled" than him reached his level by prompting AI.

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u/nalaloveslumpy 28d ago

Which is dumb. Relying on an exploit to never be patched as the cornerstone for your project is extremely fucking dumb. Fuck that dummy.

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u/thedoginthewok 9950x / 7900 XT / 64GB 6000 /~150TB NAS 28d ago

This is like the entirety of custom software on consoles. All of it uses exploits to work.
It used to be hardware exploits (mod chips etc), now it's software.

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/berealish 28d ago

Just to be clear, your takeaway as a cybersecurity professional is that defenders should stop finding obscure bugs so maintainers have less work to do?

The problem is that maintainers haven't adapted to the new era and have broken triage systems in place. And ironically, the even more root problem is fragile code written years ago that modern tooling (often made and assisted with frontier LLMs) would remediate instantly before it ever hit prod.

hey, I found this extremely obscure exploit using AI nobody would have ever discovered otherwise

It doesnt matter if its obscure, it only matters that damage can be done. If someone with an LLM can find it for the defensive side, then certainly someone on the offensive side could have found it. Which do you prefer?

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u/Low_discrepancy 28d ago

which is funny as fuck ngl and probably just cope from the lead dev guy.

How is it a cope?

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u/ComprehensivePhase20 28d ago

Honestly just the way he worded it makes him sound like a douche. If what the article quotes is correct, of course.

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u/jpavlav 28d ago

You’re a bot

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u/PrettyBaker2891 Arch 28d ago

great argument buddy. really thoughtful response.

i think you are the bot here LMAO

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u/jpavlav 28d ago

Sounds like something a bot would say

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u/Briggie Ryzen 7 5800x / ASUS Crosshair VIII Dark Hero / TUF RTX 4090 28d ago

Only ever use llms to learn a new api/library and for things like build scripts that I don’t feel like doing myself.

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u/nalaloveslumpy 28d ago

There's not even evidence that "AI slop kiddies" are even responsible for what he's mad about.

This dude is just upset that the exploit he was using got patched. Even if someone else did find the exploit because of shitty code, reporting the exploit is still the right thing to do.

https://www.techpowerup.com/352739/ps5-linux-dev-drops-project-after-slop-kiddies-cash-in-on-crucial-exploit

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u/Beautiful-Teach4648 28d ago

If you can't check your work, you shouldn't be using an llm to code.

I cannot write such code. However, I could read the code it spit out and could reasonably understand what the code was doing.

Being able to comprehend a small part of a larger program doesn't mean you reasonably understand what it's doing. You need to understand how code you're adding interacts with the larger system, otherwise you could be introducing changes in places that it wasn't intended to be. Think of it like correctly connecting the plumbing to a toilet, but in your living room. Sure, it works, but it introduces all kinds of issues that affect the rest of your home life.

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

It's like 120 lines of code in total. With quite some repetition.

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u/Beautiful-Teach4648 28d ago

With quite some repetition.

That's one of the easiest to spot indicators of low quality code.

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

What is the point you're trying to make? Oh no, the person who cannot code is using the minimum viable product instead of artisan code!

I set out to make a device that could measure the amount of energy going into my ebike without having to pay the bike shop €20 for each test. The code does exactly what I set out to achieve. It's accurate within a couple percent, more than good enough to check if a battery is deteriorating over time. The powerbank automatically went into standby because it didn't detect enough current. I had to add extra LED's so it would consume enough power to stay on. That's how damn power efficient this thing is.

I don't give a damn if the code could be nicer. It fulfills its purposes perfectly.

So again: what is the point you're trying to make?

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u/Beautiful-Teach4648 28d ago

I used an LLM to write some lines of code for a small electronics project (energy meter for an ebike). It's useful for that application. I cannot write such code. However, I could read the code it spit out and could reasonably understand what the code was doing.

What is the point you're trying to make?

You don't know what you're doing despite claiming otherwise. LLM's don't one shot "quite some reptition" as you call it, on small programs. You clearly were not getting the results you wanted and prompted a million times to get something that you think works. You ended up with a pile of spaghetti that you can't even verify that because you only "reasonably understand what the code was doing"

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 27d ago

The repetitions I talked about are just the various lines of data that get displayed. Once you understand the three lines of code determining in which position and which size it displays a word or a value, you also understand the other 5 sections that setup the other words and values displayed.

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u/pineapollo 28d ago edited 28d ago

The problem is you CAN'T reasonably understand it, you think you might from a pseudo code perspective. But if you can't write that code without assistance you don't understand the choices you would make to achieve the result.

It's like looking at a complex formula with the result, and thinking yeah clearly that has to be the result! Without understanding the formula itself.

Just to clarify, I think it's great that you used it to complete your project. It bridges the gap a lot of times, I see it with the home assistant community using LLMs to write their config files because it's kind of tedious. Just striking more on the topic of understanding the output.

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u/RibsNGibs Ryzen 9 5950X / RTX3080 / 64GB DDR4@3600 28d ago

Disagree; people can understand a language but have a hard time speaking it. I have an actual CS degree and was good at it… once, but I haven’t coded professionally in 25 years or so. I recently got into dev work in unreal engine. My syntax is hopelessly rusty, there’s all sorts of weird unreal specific macros, the c++ language itself has changed over the last 2-3 decades, and I absolutely can’t write it anymore. I 100% can read and understand what Claude is whipping up. Sometimes I’ll come across a construction I haven’t seen before and can ask it what it is, but for the most part I can read it well enough to be sceptical about an approach or suggest a different design or better methods, and on and on.

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u/Electrical-Trash-712 28d ago

I think that your experience is a little different from the person above. You might be rusty, but a cs degree isn’t in a language, it’s in the fundamental concepts of computer science. My university specifically didn’t have programming classes because the degree was meant to be in the theories, not the implementation.

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u/pineapollo 28d ago

Weird to place yourself in the seat when you are the furthest from the audience I was speaking to.

I spoke spanish loosely in grades 3 - 8 living in El Paso for 5 - 6 years gave me enough footing to pick it up to workplace competency over 20 years later regardless of being out of practice.

And furthermore, you're making the same misstep the other people responding to me are. My exact quote was:

But if you can't write that code without assistance you don't understand the choices you would make to achieve the result.

You being rusty shouldn't have any bearing on agreeing that there is generally no one solution to anything you code for. And that a lot of work, especially in upkeep and maintenance, comes in the form of optimizing and regression testing.

Understanding outlines comprehension, and to comprehend something you generally grasp the entirety of a subject.

People "thinking" they understand what an LLM is spitting out is neither of these.

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u/RibsNGibs Ryzen 9 5950X / RTX3080 / 64GB DDR4@3600 27d ago

Weird to place yourself in the seat when you are the furthest from the audience I was speaking to.

It's the internet - I had something to add to the conversation so there it is.

But if you can't write that code without assistance you don't understand the choices you would make to achieve the result.

Nah, I read the quote, and I understand it, and disagree. I have a great understanding of the nuts and bolts of what's going on - it would just take me ages to get all the stupid errors out because I'm rusty, and because as I am getting back into it, I don't have to learn the syntax anyway, because claude's doing it for me. You may think of that as a negative, but for me it honestly is just freeing me up to think about other things. The obvious analogy would be: I don't actually have any idea what's going on in the compiled machine code or assembly. Or even higher level than that: if I make a UI using QT, I honestly have no idea all the shit it's doing behind the scenes - I'm just abstracting that all away: I want a vertical box with a bunch of buttons in it and I want to wire these signals up to these methods; done. The level of hands-off when I have claude write me code is not anywhere that complete: I still read (almost) every line it spits out, and I almost always ask it to justify things that it does, or ask it to redesign something because I don't like its first attempt.

I guess the analogy that fits what's going on is pair programming. One person sitting there implementing, the other catching bugs or logic problems as they go.

Or a senior developer delegating tasks to junior programmers. Does the senior understand every decision that the junior programmer made? No, but that's ok, if the junior programmer is trustworthy, and/or if the code is getting audited in some way. I'm finding claude to be a junior/peer programmer with a very skewed skillset: encyclopedic knowledge, sometimes questionable judgment with design and approach, but never, ever fucks up on the small scale, never makes syntax errors, almost never makes off-by one or special case errors.

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u/pineapollo 27d ago

No one is talking about the convenience of AI or how even with it's relatively minor flaws in practice that it's useful. I'm not having an "AI bad" dialogue with you.

If you educated yourself and had even somewhat of a career in the field, you already understand more at a base than the average joe. Unless you hit your head somewhere along the way and lost all of your insight you again are not the person I'm talking about.

I don't really even understand what you want out of this "agree to disagree"? Thanks for you two cents, but it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

No amount of laziness to fix errors and compiler messages is going to make a newbie understand anything the code spits out. I was a TA for some basic development courses, people aren't that bright. I saw people struggle with explaining what a recursive array was after half a semester on a mid term.

Whatever that person "thinks" they understand now is fraudulent, disagree all you want. But you take the LLM out of the picture and they're back to square one, code isn't pseudocode. I would get what you were saying if you presented pseudocode to someone with almost no knowledge, but that's just plain english logic laid out in the format of code, you would have to be brain dead to not get it.

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u/TeamWorkTom 28d ago

Not true at all. Not even in the slightest. It's much easier to read and understand code than come up with it yourself.

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

Let's take this bit of code:

It takes the raw reading from the IO pin, avaeraged over 10 measurements, does a few calculations to turn that reading into a sensor voltage and then that voltage into a charging current. It then integrates those amperage readings into AmpHours. If there's a meaningul charging current, above 0.1 Amp, it shows a green LED, otherwise it remains red.
Further along the code, there's a bunch of lines to display the current and AmpHours on a small screen.

So yes, I absolutely can reasonably understand it. If I'd want the LED's to show a gradient depending on the charging current, then I could absolutely copy some lines of code and adjust them manually.

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u/pineapollo 28d ago

You missed the point of my comment - so I'll just ask 2 simple questions.

Why did you - or the LLM whichever was it, break out your math for the float the way you did, and why is your loop allowed to run so many times and how would you mitigate it?

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

Why did you - or the LLM whichever was it, break out your math for the float the way you did,

Because I did the math in steps and I didn't feel like combining that to a single formula that'd be harder to understand. Sure, that would be more efficient, but the ESP32 has plenty processing power for this basic math.

and why is your loop allowed to run so many times

It runs once a second Charging the battery can take anywhere between an hour and 10 hours. I just let it run indefinitely.

how would you mitigate it?

I unplug the power when it's done and I've read the result.

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u/pineapollo 28d ago

Sure, that would be more efficient, but the ESP32 has plenty processing power for this basic math.

Just because it does, doesn't mean you should be driving it that way. But you do you, this is going to be the endemic problem with LLM code.

"It just works" - that shouldn't be the goal. Every piece of polished software you interact with feels that way due to endless testing and optimizations.

Literally the entire gripe with Windows on this sub is how poorly optimized it is instead focusing on capturing user data and pushing CoPilot into everything.

It runs once a second Charging the battery can take anywhere between an hour and 10 hours. I just let it run indefinitely.
...
I unplug the power when it's done and I've read the result.

It runs thousands of times per second through your loop.

I get it, it's a charger. It is horribly optimized and these fixes are all incredibly simple to factor in. You could even ask your LLM to do it, this is the difference between reading and "understanding" like I highlighted.

You don't understand or comprehend what's literally happening. You can parse it and make logical inferences based on what the code presents itself as. But that is the furthest thing from understanding.

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

"It just works" - that shouldn't be the goal. Every piece of polished software you interact with feels that way due to endless testing and optimizations.

I just want to know the capacity of my ebike batteries and track decay over time, without spending €20 each time at the local bike shop. I don't need it to be polished and optimized.

It runs thousands of times per second through your loop.

No it doesn't, because there's a delay coded into the end of the loop. If you read the section of code in the screenshot, you see that in each loop, it adds (amperage / 3600 seconds) to the AmpHours total. If it did so thousands of times a second, then the reading would be of by a factor of thousands. But alas, I checked with a multimeter that it was charging at 1.9 A and after an hour of that, my meter indicated 1.89 Ah.

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u/SJ_Beast 28d ago

Ai hate is most just gatekeeping and circlejerk

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

The level at which it is hated on Reddit, is definitely an echo chamber. However, it is absolutely justified to hate on the gigantic heap of low effort shit that is being pumped out with the help of AI. I'm okay with people occasionally using AI to quickly visualise an idea. But holy crap, the amount of people passing of AI slop as art...

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u/Mistuv 28d ago

It just lowers the access barrier, 90% of Reddit, including this thread, is full of slop, blind loudmouth obnoxious morons speaking completely out of their ass. Does it mean I am going to come out against literacy to save myself from the slop takes of morons? No, I cope, it's just a price of living in a free society.

Your comment was pathetic, instead of just being glad the stupid bot wrote the code for you that you would never never manage, you are so desperate for social validation you still badmouth it. Why shouldn't the code be publicised? How would you know?? Yeah, you shouldn't publish it because you have no idea if it is or isn't. But that doesn't mean the code isn't worth publishing.

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u/Joezev98 Pentium G4560, GTX1080ti 28d ago

Why shouldn't the code be publicised?

Because it's very specific to my application and because I cannot possibly guarantee the level of quality I'd want it to have before making it public.

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u/dookarion 28d ago

Couldn't possibly be because of the slop-purveyors drowning art communities in it, music in it, github in it, software and apps in it, books in it, it being foisted on everyone in everything from notepad to their fucking phones.

Maybe if ya'll fans of it had some restraint and standards...