The PlayStation jailbreaking and homebrew scene is in absolute disarray at the moment, as the sudden explosion in vibecoded AI-slop projects is taking its toll on the community.
If you’re curious exactly how bad it’s gotten, Read Only Memo published an article three days ago stating that there were roughly 1,300 forks of the PS5 emulators KytyPS5, SharpEmu, and AnyPS5 on GitHub—a pretty obvious sign of LLM-related tomfoolery, considering how young the three emulators are.
Today, however, there are roughly 1,840 forks of the same emulators. I kid you not, in between adding them up and typing that, the number of forks increased by four.
It’s not just the folks downloading the slop who are at the receiving end of it now, though, as the team behind the beloved PlayStation 4 homebrew enabler GoldHEN has had their project stolen from under them and published online by a fellow PlayStation homebrew dev.
Why? Well, I hope you have a pretty high tolerance for cringe before we get into it, as the thief in question, known by his handle Zer0Day, clearly considers himself an Anonymous-style hacktivist. This is purely based on the lengthy README file included on the AI ripoff’s GitHub page, which features some grade-A fedora-tipping bangers such as “code should not be a cage” and “creativity should never have to ask for permission.”
Translation to what that idiot says:
“I used AI to reverse engineer GoldHEN, a fully copyrighted and actively maintained PS4 payload that Sistro, one of the scene’s top contributors, and countless other good people like @Kameleonre_ have spent years building, refining and… https://t.co/5O0Znxnzqc— Pharaoh2k (@_Pharaoh2k) October 6, 2026
For context, GoldHEN is the number-one PlayStation 4 homebrew and emulation tool of choice among the community these days. It features literally everything you could feasibly want out of a PS4 homebrew tool, including VR support, custom trophy support, an integrated FPS counter, and even tools to help enable PS4 Remote Play.
GoldHEN is closed source and primarily designed by one user: Sistro. However, several loyal maintainers contribute to the project and assist Sistro with their work—work that has taken them roughly five years to complete.
And, if you’re curious as to why GoldHEN is closed-source, Sistro directly explains why in the README on the project’s GitHub: “Project source code is currently private because over time I have seen a sad abuse of the source code that I, like the previous devs who worked on it, have been pleased to make it available to everyone to study and maybe improve it.”
Apparently, this upset Zer0Day, who in a post on X, alongside an image of his reverse-engineered version of GoldHEN, said “I don’t care what [GoldHEN’s] team thinks” about his AI-slop ripoff, and asserted that he believes he has “the right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.”
If you’re curious as to how we know this is AI slop, that’s simple: Zer0Day has been quite open about it in the replies. A quick glance at the deleted code in Zer0Day’s GitHub is really all the proof you need, though, because humans do not type nonsense shit like “these are the standard Elf64 structures it walks” above their code.
The README section is where things get really embarrassing, however, as it reads as if it was written by the lovechild of the Unabomber and a 4chan moderator. It’s a tough read, mostly because Zer0Day apparently genuinely believes that the GoldHEN team were restricting his “freedom” by not making their project open source. Touch grass doesn’t even begin to cover it.
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