The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by AI, and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI. The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI.
“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site.
But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”
AI-powered video game decomps and recomps (recompiling code after modifying it) are everywhere. People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on, or to combine various games in any permutations you could possibly imagine. In recent days, tools specifically designed to decomp games with AI have popped up, such as “decomp.wtf,” which promises to “point the AI agent you already use at a game you own. decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original.”
Decomp.dev was a collaborative website that hosted file libraries and tools for reverse engineering, re-coding, and decompiling existing video games, meaning taking an existing game and recreating its source code. Decompiling a video game can be done for a variety of reasons and is popular in a few different niches of video game fandom. Speed runners decompile video games to find potential glitches or advantages they can use to beat a game faster; hobbyists decompile video games to port them to new platforms or to emulate them (for example, making Super Mario 64 run natively on PC); modders decompile games so they can more easily modify them; archivists decompile games to recreate code that may be lost; and some people decompile games just for the challenge.
Encounter wrote that the use of AI in the community has sped things up to the point where it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects, and people using AI have taken existing, human-led AI projects and have created “hostile forks” of them, where open-source code written by humans is taken and “finished” by AI: “These kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric.” Encounter added, “anyone with an AI subscription can manage to create a port or static recompilation that functions at a basic level […] While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it.”
Define “too easy” because the last AI decomp I saw was a 600ish megabyte Pokémon game for the DS that cost the guy $56k worth of tokens and was ultimately pointless because the actual source code had leaked ages ago.
First of all, lol.
Second of all, decompiling a binary in a clean room setting is not pointless just because leaked source code exists, because the decompilation can legally be used to make projects based on it whereas the leaked source code cannot be touched without facing the wrath of Nintendo lawyers.
Now, using AI to decompile a binary will likely not produce human-readable code, and will ultimately be pointless for things like studying code, producing high quality ports and mods, etc., but if a human or a group of humans did it, it can be extremely useful.
I doubt legality is a shield against them suing you and honestly I’m not entirely sure they’d lose; many judges aren’t technically literate enough to understand the difference between leaked source and decompiled. Better hope the lawyers you can afford are better than the ones they can.
I would be surprised if there is any case where direct use of decompiled code was ruled as “clean room” and transformative. People keep using that phrase without really understanding it.
Think the people assuming that clean room principles apply to this scenario are way too optimistic about the legality.
The most prominent clean room example was making a knockoff of the IBM BIOS. The thing is it was cloning a programming interface surface, and doing so with zero visibility into the object code, but instead an api reference written by people who did study the object code. Wine is even more clean room, guessing at a viable implementation based on black box observation of Windows behavior with zero understanding of the object code.
Translating object code into source code is not “clean room”. But even if it were, we are talking about a deep clone down to the implementation and up through the human presentation. Not merely some programming interface details with a completely novel backend and with other code mostly owning the presentation to a human.
People keep thinking they find a technical loophole but consistently get shot down the millisecond a rights holder takes note.
See the myriad of fan projects that don’t even try to clone a game engine but implement a game a new way, they get shut down hard.
Saw someone about a decomp that after $250k was only 80% accurate.
That said, it is a use case that AI should be viable for: a known source of truth that can be used to verify a guess and drive retries. It needs a lot of tries, hence token costs, but it should, given enough retries, be able to let much “get it”.
Yeah but is there really any value in something like that? Maybe for corporate espionage, I guess, but that 250k is still heavily subsidized; these AI companies are hemorrhaging money. What happens when the capex fountain runs dry; is anyone going to pay a million dollars in tokens to get an 80% accurate decomp of an old pokemon game?
Oh I think it is shit, especially reading that 250k and the result was still 20% off of target in a scenario that should, in theory, be right in GenAI’s wheelhouse.
Btw the decomp I was referencing was of the original modern warfare 2 from 2009.
lol, amazing. This is what we get out of these datacenters burning tons of diesel. Everything is just so stupid.
For that price, I could create my own GPU farm of local models, instead of wasting money on tokens.
…they go into detail in the article.
It doesn’t say how much these decamps cost, or what quality they are. I don’t think burning a years salary on this is “easy”.
Burning money is actually quite easy.
Building a Lamborghini is easy, just go to the dealership and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Building a Lamborghini is not equivalent to spending money.
Wasting the money on a Lamborghini is easy.
Paying an AI for a decompilation is not the same as doing the decompilation. You’re buying the decompilation; that doesn’t mean the act itself was easy to accomplish.
Hey, now we’re saying the same thing :)
It’s easy to spend the money on AI doing the decompilation. It’s not easy to do the decompilation itself.
So it didn’t actually make decompilation too easy, as the headline suggests.