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.”
Can’t compare code quality for code that was never written. If someone reverse engineers a game that no one was working on with AI that code is better then nothing.
Doesn’t have to, I’m fully for having platforms for only humans and if someone wants to make a platform for reverse engineering without AI that’s fine by me. Nothings stopping people from playing chess even though computers are objectively better at it now.
The models will still exist. If anthropic goes bankrupt tomorrow the weights for opus 5 will still exist and be sold off to someone, it’s not just going to disappear. Same with open weight models, plenty of people have them downloaded and can torrent them worst case scenario if the companies stop distributing them.
In general I think you’re underestimating the capabilities of modern AI and overestimating the capabilities of your average developer. At this point properly made AI code is better and more maintainable then 90% of developers code.
Yeah it’ll make it so you lose skills, but any technology that helps you will. Cars make people unable to walk as far, gps makes people dependent on their phone for directions, hell even shoes stop callouses and make it so you can’t walk without them.
Even in programming we offload large parts of functionality to libraries we don’t know the inner workings of.
Stack overflow probably atrophied programmers ability to think through a problem and read manuals, but overall it produces better code because, as any SO thread will show you, people come up with stupid solutions to problems and having a source to say what is the correct solution increases code quality as opposed to a programmer thinking through it to a naive solution.
We know AI produces unmaintainable spaghetti, having LLM-generated versions reduces incentive for human programmers to make their own version.
The community mentioned in the article did that, found it was untennable, and decided to shut down over it…
That’s nice, but what happens in a coupla years when languages and libraries continue to be updated and your model isn’t trained for them? How long can you bodge together it to work with until you have to train something new? Who will handle the cost of that?
Does that still count when you talk about people who have been developing for 5 years? For 10?
Both of those are common skills that can be built up over a matter of weeks to months at most, as opposed to niche professional skills which take years to build.
The skills needed to properly keep an LLM in line will atrophy as you use them less and less.
Yeah that’s why I’ve always used as little third party code in my personal projects as possible, I’ve never been a fan of over using other peoples code.
First off, programmers have had forums to ask questions since the Usenet days. Granted, most of them never got near how big stack overflow was even 10 years ago.
These forums are double edged sword for education, yes you can copy and paste, but the best answers were posted by experienced devs clearly and carefully explaining what and why they did.
Because unlike an LLM, they understand WHY they’re doing what they’re doing.
When used properly I would argue stack overflow, like any other good documentation, can make you a better programmer, not worse.