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.”
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.
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.
turns out "technically correct" is the worst kind of correct
AI is great about putting out something like a human half assing whatever it is doing. Looks ok at a glance but there are problems when you look into the details.
I'm so fucking sick of AI slop.
I've been enjoying "using AI is like using a hammer to put screws it a board. It looks fine and holds together for a bit, but the littlest bit of pressure or shaking and it starts to fall apart."
Reminds me of keto recipes for non keto foods. Looks mostly like the thing. Hardly tastes like it.
That’s because it’s just gonna be the same level as the average coder, and the average coder is a lazy pos.
Heyyyyy! I am not laz...ahh, he's right. Who am I kidding. I'm lazy af.
Yes, working with some "Enterprise" software development teams in my career..
Their codebases were nightmares of people trying shit without actually understanding until the tests seemingly passed.
So no surprise that same crowd is having a pretty decent experience for them with AI: it codes almost as shitty as they did, in the same way.
Hey!
I’m also fat. A fat, lazy pos.
Let’s see the AI do that! Ha!
Have you seen their RAM requirements? The AI is very fat indeed.
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
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.
I don’t think it’s a problem with overhyping the results. It’s the fact that you can get something with essentially no work. If the LLM just didn’t output anything at all but told you with a voice prompt that couldn’t be transcribed to text you wouldn’t see anyone using it. It’s the fact that it allows people to be lazy and still get output, no matter how bad the output is as long as the thing runs, that is making these chatbots so popular.
Well the real problem is the signal to noise, the noise looking almost just right, and people over excited over the novelty of "I can help now!", even if they really can't.
If the thing runs right, then it would be less of a problem, but it almost runs right.
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?
That requires the person to know what they're doing, and using the AI as the tool it is. That's a proper use of generative AI in coding, to speed up a human-driven process with oversight.
That's not what AI slop is, AI slop is what vibe coders do. They don't know how any of the shit actually works, they just tell the AI to do something, and modify prompting until it gives them something that works. They can't fix the issues because they don't know what was done in the first place.
The problem is that both use types look identical to anyone not directly involved in the project. Things like Claude don't tell you whether it was used by a vibe coder or a responsible developer, it looks exactly the same.
Sight amendment, they prompt until it gives them something that looks like it works, based on their often incomplete understanding of the target use case and likely laziness to explore all the nuance of the result.
Like people who were heavy users of Photoshop that tried the vibed knockoff lamented that it failed at all but the most basic image editing tasks. The vibe coder likely never used Photoshop for anything more than casual use, so they couldn't have vetted the result properly even if they were inclined to.
It's a shame that it's leading to the close of a community that could have actually put together a better system for adapting to this. That sense of community that died to this would have been a great way to team up and vet each others work. Even vibe coders could have had a part, they may not have the skill to actually program things but they clearly have the time and interest.
Problem is just the sheer volume of shit to vet. Vibe coders get a bit pissy when folks seemingly can't "keep up" with their volume of shit and just keep shitting more and making an unmanageable backlog. They figure if the AI in their unskilled hands can get it over 80% there, then surely a skilled person can somehow use AI to knock out that last bit fast.
Issue being that however far the vibe coder got, the skilled people they look to finish it off could have just gotten it that far themselves just as quickly. It's like someone sending a search to Google on someone's behalf and pastes the result and thinking that was somehow way easier than the person just searching Google themselves.
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...
Recomps didn't require AI, and those didn't take years to complete.
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
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.
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.
It's a massive trend right now and everyone is trying to vibecode their own decomps/ports, often people who have no idea what they're doing.
There are plenty of AI-assisted ones that are actually good, but they're hard to find amidst the untested slop. It doesn't help that a lot of these self-proclaimed "native PC ports" just turn out to be an emulator packaged with the game.