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.”
Oh no, ai killing hobbies and art and fun oh nooo such a surprise if only anybody had seen this comingggg
“Coring out the brain of humanity” is a phrase that comes to my mind more often these days.
People don’t use AI as a tool which is the problem. They just ask it to do a job and don’t analyze or do anything with the results. It’s made people lazier about research. I’m not trusting what a machine decided should be there.
I once use AI to build a resume for me based off the one I already had and it just made shit up.
and don’t analyze
see: “decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original”
when the C code creates byte-wise identical output, then there is not much need to analyse. The code is already as good as it gets, or at least there is not much room for improvement.
or do anything with the results.
see: “People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on”
This seems kind of sad.
It is sad! I’ve always loved being part of small communities and to see one get destroyed like this and so quickly is really sad.
The fucking AI decomps SUCK too. I can’t be the only who who’s noticed. Bugs, performance issues, missing features, etc. Sure, technically they work, but it’s not a great experience. Every time I see a new decomp posted my very first question is “was it done with AI?”, Because if it was, I probably won’t bother with it.
Please don’t take this as a defence of AI, but I saw this with human-led decomp projects too.
I was pretty active in the Pokemon hacking scene a few years back, and I happen to have a friend who has made a very popular rom hack (not giving names, but if you are interested in those kind of things, you probably played his game), and he told me that he tried to switch from binary hacking to decomp, but the decomp had so many insidious bugs, especially in the battle system, that he much rather keep making hacks with HMA (the currently popular universal hacking tool) rather than deal with that can of worms.
I also happen to be a huge Ace Combat fan, and the recomp project of AC6 is miles better than what the emulator offered just a year ago. If it wasn’t for AI, I would still be forced to use my OG X360 to have anything resembling a good experience on that game. The AI-led recomp is just as good as the game on original hardware, and gives me the chance to play the since-delisted DLCs too.
I don’t think this is as black and white as saying “human-made good, AI-made bad”. It’s a matter of how much care the person behind the decomp/recomp puts into it, AI or not.
Which sucks, because I think the best aspect of these projects was the community that would develop around them, the treasure trove of knowledge that someone would gather by working on them, and, as dumb as it sounds, the friends you made along the way. Some of my best friends, I got to know through the Pokemon hacking scene, and it wouldn’t have happened if everything was a matter of writing a bunch of prompts on an LLM. The fact that AI made them so easy, and that they are completely indistinguishable from human-led projects (aside from looking at the publication date) is sad. I think that’s the worst part of this situation.
If your friend made or helped to make Pokemon Unbound, I appreciate them
You might be conflating decomps with ports that use decomps as a base.
A decompilation means taking a binary and reverse engineering source code that, when compiled, will produce an identical binary targeting the same platform.
AI has also been ruining decomps, making it a race and a numbers game, rather than focusing on quality and the production of human-readable code and the long-term documentation of how a game functions for long term preservation.
That’s a shame because if AI was used as a tool, it would still have the community helping to make the ports functional.
Hand created ports also had performance issues, missing features, etc that took years for the community to fix.
It seems like it’s a problem of over hyping the results like what has happened with AI everywhere.
Couldn’t this be mitigated by better attention on the part of the human operator? Like, use the ai to crack it open, then actually go back through and verify that everything actually works?
Is it better than nothing, because that’s mostly what we had before. Decomp used to take years for one N64 game. Bugs can be ironed out.
It’s actually a lot tougher to iron out bugs that GenAI can’t sort out for itself than I usually see with human code. Trying to fix a bug the vibe coder couldn’t get the AI to squash is always a maddening nightmare…
From what I’ve seen from the AI rollout in my company, it’s mostly because vibecoders are not coders.
If you give a vague prompt you get basically scratchpad pseudocode quality, but if you have a well defined spec, clear coding standards, etc. you get a passable junior level output, sometimes better if it’s a particularly well trodden process like OIDC.
It’s not gonna break new ground without direct help/manual coding, but for gap-filling and simple bugs it’s become quite reliable at this point, just not in the end of amateurs.
They can’t of the trend pushes those with the knowledge how out of the scene like is clearly happening.
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do
Edit:
Okay so I went back and I figure you meant
This kind of trend pushes those with the know how out of the scene like what is clearly happening.
I’d say there’s probably a bigger opportunity for those with the know how to leverage it. People that were in for the insane puzzle level that is decompiling from what I understand can still do it.
I think either people are in it for the fun, or for opening up games. If a tool coming out and making it much easier is what gets you to quit, then you were in it for the wrong reasons.
Sounds like some flavor of gatekeeping. "Well if everyone else can do it, I quit :( ". Meh.
Hey, quit gatekeeping quitting!
People can be quitting for “bad” reasons, but assuming they all are is unfair and unhelpful. That large groups and projects are shuttering over these changes should be met with more than “they’re just overacting”. Even if they are, the long term damage is real and should be concerning.
Recomps didn’t require AI, and those didn’t take years to complete.
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.
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.
Define “too easy”
…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”.
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.
If anyone is looking for alternatives that are useful it looks like recomp.fyi is doing a good job.
This feels like an asshole move. Instead of providing a central location for tracking, encouraging open sourcing and continued development the dude just threw his hands up in the air and said “I give up”.
Like yeah, the AI usage sucks and those versions are buggy as hell but at least it’s a start for some games and people can continue the work to improve it.
But now without easy tracking every script kiddy and vibecoder are just going to assume they are the first and make another project somewhere then repeat the same work that has already been done.
I get that life happens or people move on from a project but damn dude, let someone else takeover or GTFO of the way.
To be fair, the slop users are relentless. Trying to even decide when to say yes to becomes a maddening chore if your community is popular and attract tons of random people excited about the novelty of being able to “contribute”.
As in other cases, AI is at its worst when you have to deal with other people’s output. So closed source can have a reasonably happy time because everyone that isn’t on the same page is within slapping distance. But open communities and projects… Oof…
It may feel that way, but it’s not an asshole move. We are all struggling with mental health and existential dread in the face of what sometimes seems to be a genuine polycrisis that includes an AI apocalypse. Some people deal with this stress more effectively than others, but it doesn’t make someone an asshole when they just can’t take it anymore and you’ve gotta expect some people are going to crash out pretty hard. This is a lot milder than how some people are going to inevitably crash out, and this is not going to be the only situation like this.
The asshole part is not letting others fork it or open sourcing it. Like I said, I get that life happens but the dude is literally blocking progress.
Maybe they have reasons, maybe they’re good reasons, maybe they’re not. It doesn’t matter, because we aren’t entitled to know why they don’t want to release the code, and we aren’t entitled to the code either. Nobody should be obligated to open source their code (unless money has changed hands). It’s not exactly proprietary cutting edge research that will take decades to rediscover and reimplement.
I’m sorry, but I hate how people think free services that never promised to be open source, don’t ask anything of you, don’t take advantage of you, and don’t sell your data, somehow because they got popular because of that, makes them owe the community even more than anyone would ever believe that exploitive freemium or even paid, commercial software does. Nobody’s pretending that Adobe owes us the source code because millions of people paid for Photoshop. We all acknowledge they’re an asshole, but we know we’re not getting the source code and many people still pay for it.
So why does a free website owe its community even more than that? Like the fact that they were kind and generous to the community for a few years means they are now obligated to be a complete doormat and give you everything you want from them upon request or be called an asshole? They don’t get any personal rights and if they try to have any, they’re an asshole, but commercial software does it all the time and it’s okay because it’s just expected that commercial software is going to be an asshole? WTF? We just call anybody who doesn’t give us their source code upon request an asshole? Shut down the whole internet and from now on only provide services that are completely open source from day 1? Sure, sounds great. Anyone who’s got code you like and is just trying to survive this capitalist dystopia without releasing all their source code for free is an asshole, fuck them. Got it.
I get your point, and since this project has only been up for two years it’s not too much history being lost.
However, I also empathize with the perspective of the site maintainer as well. There’s a lot more chaff to be separated from the wheat with the deluge of vibecoded submissions. I think keeping a frozen record of the site might be best to provide a point-in-time snapshot of where human-based progress of decompilation has gotten to. Someone else can manage the sifting through the AI slop, because that’s not what the maintainer signed up for.
Like yeah, the AI usage sucks and those versions are buggy as hell but at least it’s a start for some games and people can continue the work to improve it.
They can’t keep up with it though, they said it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects because of the use of AI in the community. It’s simply not viable to continue the community the way it was intended and I can’t blame them for not wanting to put more work toward something they don’t support any longer.
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.”
Is there anywhere to follow these types of things? I’ve been seeing it all lately from third hand sources
Yeah I was surprised to hear about how big the AI decomp wave was from my friends, because there was absolutely no buzz about it on lemmy.
Makes me wonder how many other things I miss because of using Lemmy instead of Reddit…
Making game purposefully limited fucking blows. I’m all for it, AI or not. I can’t play some of my favorite games because I’m not ready to bootlick microsoft and their bloated spy OS, let alone the console exclusives.
This is the reckoning Sony and co. deserve.
Lemmy a year ago: “let’s go open source clones, software should be free, fuck IP, fuck Nintendo and adobe”
Lemmy now: “no, not like that”
AI decompilation is not free software. You’re relying on proprietary models, for one thing. And you’re starting from a proprietary base program. Sure, you might get something usable at the end, but “free software” means you don’t get sued for it either.
You’re relying on proprietary models, for one thing
The development of the software requires propietary models, not the software itself. If I use windows with a propietary IDE to develop software and make it open source that software is still free, even if the build and development system requires propietary software.
means you don’t get sued for it either.
Clean room rebuilds are legal under copyright law. If you can prove that you didn’t see the source and only made something based off observing it’s functionality that is allowed.
The development of the software requires propietary models, not the software itself. If I use windows with a propietary IDE to develop software and make it open source that software is still free, even if the build and development system requires propietary software.
That’s part of the point, though. Software developed on Windows in a proprietary IDE could’ve been theoretically developed on Linux with neovim, but software developed using proprietary AI couldn’t have been developed in an open source way; there’s no meaningful way to replicate its output for confirmation. You don’t know how it was made, and you can’t produce its output for yourself. You can’t continue development in kind.
Clean room rebuilds are legal under copyright law. If you can prove that you didn’t see the source and only made something based off observing it’s functionality that is allowed.
Theoretically. We’re still in a world where the corporations have control over the courts and could very easily spend enough money to get them to rule in their favor.
Besides, I think it could be very easily argued that an AI decomp isn’t a “clean room,” since you’re directly modifying the built binary.
EDIT: also worth noting, Windows and Visual Studio’s developers were paid for their work (the developers of AI’s training data were not), and Windows and Visual Studio do not have a major negative environmental impact. Not to mention, learning decompilation is a valuable skill that translates to other disciplines, and abandoning it entirely means that we’re losing that skillset as a society.
Do you really think this or do you need someone to explain to you why this isn’t great?
Sure, explain why someone reverse engineering adobe software or older games and open sourcing it isn’t great
Because its worse code quality, also because you’re fucking up hobbiest programming.
What do you think happens when everyone runs outta money to train the corporate frontier models, and open-weight models stop being given out as loss leaders?
Great way to lose a communal skillset to time, at least when we did this with space travel we had the excuse of not doing it in the same capacity for like 50 years because of the exorbitant expense.
I mean do you know what maintaining these things by hand will be like when we inevitably have to do so? The amount of drudging through spaghetti that’ll have to happen?
What’s your solution to that? Asking Claude to “fix the problem without making new ones, pretty please with a strawberry on top?”
My comp sci teachers/profs always said FORTRAN programmers made dough because the old guys who still knew it where dying off, despite it still being used for older financial systems.
Never expected that to happen to the then cutting-edge knowledge I’ve gained both from school and self study by the time I hit my early 30s.
But at least I know I’ll probably have easy money coming to me in 3-5 years when the braindrain really hits :)
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.
because you’re fucking up hobbiest programming.
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.
What do you think happens when everyone runs outta money to train the corporate frontier models, and open-weight models stop being given out as loss leaders?
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.
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.
We know AI produces unmaintainable spaghetti, having LLM-generated versions reduces incentive for human programmers to make their own version.
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 community mentioned in the article did that, found it was untennable, and decided to shut down over it…
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.
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?
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.
Does that still count when you talk about people who have been developing for 5 years? For 10?
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.
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.
Even in programming we offload large parts of functionality to libraries we don’t know the inner workings of.
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.
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.
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.
Why does the owner of decomp.dev sound so defeated? Aren’t their legitimate decomp projects still existing and going strong?
EDITED to be a less charged question. Im realizing how devastating this situation actually is.And I’m quite sad to see something that I care so deeply for being destoyed
Out of interest, are you part of any decomp communities? As a contributor to one, I can absolutely confirm this is a period of turmoil with the rise of AI PRs, people doing low effort changes that weren’t even human verified etc.
Without wanting to sound gatekeepy, this was a niche community project I got into a few years ago where we were all researching and learning and communicating as a proper open source team, but it does feel like those days are mostly kinda over? Or at least most projects that might have spun up in such a way no longer will
And I think the main sadness here is I’m seeing this in my real life work and it’s now extending into my hobbyist projects too
I’ve been trying to get involved slowly. I’ve been teaching myself MIPS and C for a couple years now. I go onto decomp.me sometimes as I’m starting to get to know the process and looking at scratches.
So I get that my question might sound disingenuous, but I truly want to know if Im jumping into a sinking ship.
I think it’s just harder to find projects that aren’t slop drops. I don’t want to sound like these communities don’t exist (currently) but it’s hard not to worry about the future.
But I do also believe in the power of communities to organise around a common goal. If there’s a game you like why not start a project and find others that share your goal… just be prepared that there is a lot of fending off of low quality slop right now, and the expectations of the general public for something to get released quickly is at an all time high.
Contributing to a human led decomp project has been one of the most rewarding and enjoyable things I’ve done
