SNES emulator developer for Analogue Pocket fed up with yet another vibe coder submitting 50,000 lines of AI code for review

Among the best parts of the Analogue Pocket is openFPGA, a fancy name for its support of open-source, homebrew emulators built by enthusiasts. But like seemingly every corner of the retro dev scene, the makers of these FPGA cores are dealing with a flood of low-effort, vibe-coded slop from would-be contributors. The dev behind the SNES core for Analogue Pocket is the latest to voice frustration.

Yesterday, a contributor going by nasonliu submitted an "experimental MSU-1 streaming" feature for the SNES core. The MSU-1 is essentially a fictitious enhancement chip for the console. It never existed in real life, but emulator developers created it as a standard that lets Super NES romhackers add CD-quality audio and similar improvements to games.

agg23, who ported the SNES FPGA core to Analogue Pocket, started off measured. "If it works, that's pretty cool; I didn't think I would ever see this implemented," he said. Then came the "but" you can probably see coming.

You sent me a nearly 50k line diff, unasked for, completely LLM built, and you somehow expect me to review it. There is SO MUCH unrelated garbage here.

In other words, the new feature amounted to 50,000 lines of machine-generated code that the developer would have had to review by hand before merging it into the core. He added that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.

You are infringing on the time and brainpower of people by pushing "your" content that little/no of your brainpower went into; completely unrequested. I hope for the sake of all responsible maintainers that you do not do such a thing again. Again, I think it's cool that you and your LLM supposedly got this to work. It has no place in my world.

The devs behind PS3 emulator RPCS3 voiced a similar sentiment earlier this year, when they begged contributors to "stop submitting AI slop code." RPCS3 doesn't ban AI use outright, but it does require contributors to understand the code they submit from top to bottom.

Plenty of programmers swear that AI is simply a tool that makes work more efficient. But in communities building emulators and other new ways to play classic games, experienced devs are now being bombarded with generated code from newbie vibe coders who don't fully understand what they're making.