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.”
With what RAM & drives‽ Are you scaling the monopsony?
A guillotine is a famous political tool. So are machines. Users are politically responsible for how tools are utilized. And in the case of video games, entertainment. Slop machine do two things, make the user think they are decompiling games, and make the user dependent on not learning reverse engineering. So that’s 2 awful political atrophies: two regressive alignments.
what would you say is easier for a group of dissenters to set up: a robotized full assembly line (mass production, a major tool of capitalism) or get enough compute power to put together a reasonable open LLM model that can reverse engineer propriety softwares?
1- A person who knew nothing about reverse engineering now can reverse engineer. In all honesty in %99 of such cases the person would probably not put in the required time and effort to be an expert reverse engineer if there was no AI, that takes a lot of will power and dedication. They would simply not be doing it. So in a sense this is a form of empowerment (with possibly not great end products). In fact if someone with a basic level of know how uses the AI correctly, they can get MUCH better at reverse engineering in a short amount of time then they could have by searching references online. It is hard to imagine how these two would balance to create a net positive or negative effect though. This applies to virtually any field that AI is good at. I think AI is fantastic at IT and by asking it to resolve something then asking it how it resolved it you can learnt a lot of commands and tools you never knew existed. It is up to you to make good use of it.
2- A person who can already reverse engineer uses AI all the time to do the job and loses the skill. The same said person could have also used AI to learn about things he does not know but if they instead just want to use the AI as fully automated code generators this is again saying more about the person than the AI. Usage of AI presents you with alternative routes some of which will atrophy your skills but this is due to laziness not due to design.
In the end software or reverse engineered stuff you get out of full automated AI code factories still suck. It needs a lot of human intervention to be reasonable and the larger the software is harder it likely is. But again this is something that actually might play against capitalism. In their greed many companies are trying to adopt the automated code factory approach (because then they can fire people and generate more revenue) but this is only sustainable if AI keeps improving itself and can actually come up with mostly bug-free software. Otherwise loss of skill and unmaintainable tangle of software will likely fuck everything up.