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.”
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...
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.
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.
They do it for free, if they decided to just take the thing down at least respect that. If people want to have a similar stuff they can just, idk, vibecode it since it's the in thing today.
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.