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.”
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.
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.