Link: https://www.404media.co/video-game-reverse-engineering-community-shuts-down-because-ai-has-made-it-too-easy/

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.

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.

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.

Consider this, though;

Corporations will now be forced to reckon with the fact that IP is meaningless thanks to their new toys. Anything extant is fair game for AI? Buckle the fuck up, then, 'cause that's a very nice everything you have there, and it'd be a shame of somebody AI'd it. Which they will. And it'll either be crowd-sourced like these game de-re-comps, or it'll be the unofficial "rogue agent" breaking all your shit wide open because you also have your own "rogue agents" talking to theirs.

Legislation will happen sooner this way, and while the damage will undoubtedly have been done to your average creative intellectual in the short term, at least creative intellectuals are capable of adapting to the new. The shackles that will rightfully-but-belatedly be placed on AI once this comes to a head will genuinely cripple many of these companies who went literally ALL FUCKING IN on AI.

It may yet still be too little too late in terms of a great many things we have so long taken for granted, but take a look at the PS5 leak and Sony's take on ownership alongside all this and tell me that isn't the most hilariously ironic thing that could happen to them.

All this shit is about to come right back around, and they've all talked themselves into a corner that this is for the good of everyone that it works like it does. Bet, bitches, here comes the slop that is on the surface totally indistinguishable from your actual product that is also now inextricably linked to your brand. Y'all are fucked and have nobody to blame but yourselves.

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.

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.”

The loss of skills as this continues to happen is going to be devastating. At least as people moved from machine level coding to higher compilers there were still programming methodology and awareness of how and why things work. One problem with AI in anything is that it's difficult to keep it focused on just one thing, it likes to wander and do other changes too, which for coding will end up changing and breaking stuff and the human has no idea why since it wasn't even assigned.

We've lived for a while in a consume and trash society where the ability to fix things yourself is gone, and now it's in coding.

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.

I could definitely imagine something like GTA6 getting cracked and then half-assedly ported to PS3 by AI. Let the greed and hubris of all the companies who thought they could fire all their talent and corner the market on slopbased IP rehashes for infinite profit at minimal cost fire back on them.

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’s because it’s just gonna be the same level as the average coder, and the average coder is a lazy pos.

Honestly, what would be nice is for a community like this to serve as gatekeeper with high standards for decomp projects to meet. Sure 99% won't make it in but who cares?

I know we're in the Wild West days right now but eventually things will settle. If the foss community can find a way to make torrents organized safe and accessible they can do anything.

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.

Wow I kind of expected a better headline from 404. The website makes it clear that it's not about being easy, it's about it being low effort and antisocial.

Hey!

I’m also fat. A fat, lazy pos.

You don't think low-effort and easy can be the same?

Eh, I'm really not worried. The decomps are interesting as a proof of concept, but they really really aren't very good, and once the VC funding runs out and the vibe coders have to invest actual money, you'll see a big decrease in these decomps and vibe coded apps. The world of foss will largely return to the hands of the people who actually care about the quality of their code.

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.

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.

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.

Let’s see the AI do that! Ha!

The tone carries clearly different connotations, one way makes it sound more positive and the other makes it sound more negative. Tone is very important in a headline.

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.

Where do you get the wandering AI idea from?

The worst I get when I tell pretty much any hosted/service frontier model to do a specific focused task is "I also noticed [potential bug/issue/code smell], if you would like me to do anything about it, just say the word".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

My own experience and understanding that if allowed, it will recreate existing code that is working with something a bit different, that may still work. It's the code version of the image generation where it narrows in on one aspect of the picture to your specifics, but something in the background is altered slightly. And yes, image generation is a different type of model, and inpainting can avoid this, AND minimizing letting the context window get too large, but that's just it. If given freedom, it will drift over time. In the end it's probabilistic math, and without heavy guardrails things change.

If the human is in control, aware of what's being done, and the AI is used as a tool to help the human and not a black box to get a result without intervention, then a lot of this is avoided. Is it being used like this? Some places. Most places, no.

I don’t think burning a years salary on this is “easy”.

Burning money is actually quite easy.

Decomp.wtf which was referenced as one of the tools has been archived today, because it's author realised it's killing the community. Cats out of the bag now, so not sure how that will help.

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.

What the fuck are you on about? You're talking about abstract nonsense.

Coding AI doesn't "recreate existing code that is working with something a bit different".

If I have, say, a website or an app, and I tell the AI that on this and this page/screen there's a green button, and I want that to turn blue, it goes in, finds the button (either via code analysis or via an emulator/browser + visual identification), finds its style, and changes the colour.

If I tell it to figure out what the very same button does, it does the same flow, except it goes further by tracing that button's click event, and then all the logic that is bound to it, even through multiple layers (e.g. in a well designed app that click event is handled in the ViewModel of the specific screen, which in turn calls a Use case, which in turn incorporates business logic and calls Repositories, which in turn call the data storage or networking layers, or maybe even both...), then explains what happens.

But let me give you a real world example. Just the other day I was working on a tool, a web flasher for a handful of different ESL (Electronic Shelf Label, e-ink based price tags). It involves connecting to a USB probe, plugging the probe into the board via spring contacts, and then running specific code to install custom software on the device so it talks to my smarthome. Most of the work was lift and shift - the flashing logic existed as C/Python code, so it was quickly ported to JavaScript, utilising WebUSB.

But it was ugly. The only thing I told the damn thing was to "make it look good". You know what the AI did?

It went onto the official site of the project, grabbed the fonts, colours, sizes, etc., and put that style on the flasher page. The only "went out of its way" thing it added was a "virtual e-ink display" emulating a tag, that was actually on the project site (https://openepaperlink.de/). It didn't go around changing the flashing code, the device detection, etc., it just covered the changes I requested - which were pretty broad.

What AI does depends 100% on the prompt. Image editing is a bit finicky because most image editing models come with their own LLM beyond the visual engine itself, and that LLM tends to be super limited, without any thinking loop, so it does what it first recognises (and often doesn't recognise negation - e.g. telling it to NOT change something, will result in specifically that change, because, again, the LLM included is tiny and crappy).

But you can't compare a "hey I asked AI to do X to my image and it did twelve other things" to working with codegen AI - especially the reinforced loop models like Claude or Codex that literally goes on to work out any issues by expanding on its own task while the goal remains what you set it to. So if you tell it to design a fancy website for you, you get a fancy website - but e.g. it won't start working on creating an investment portfolio or do sports bets for you.

cost the guy $56k worth of tokens

If your friend made or helped to make Pokemon Unbound, I appreciate them

What can affect AAA can affect indies too, let's not forget that.

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.

I don't know of many indie games that obfuscate and knee cap their own product so it doesn't work on other platforms or so modding it becomes an impossibility. There isn't a legit reason why battlefield, GTA and God of war can't run on Linux. The indie community isn't pulling bullshit like this.

I wish I were fucking joking

In some cases, but the text of the article implies that a big issue with the AI decomps is that they're low quality, so it's not really making it easier to do the actual work involved so much as it's automating low effort slop

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.

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.

My own experiences with various projects aren't abstract nonsense. You said yourself the prompt matters, and a broad prompting over time on the same project does drift. You haven't seen it, then good. I can't speculate on why. I''m not even saying it always happened, only that because of how these things work, probability does come into play.

The last is a strawman, I was using image generation as an example of visual drift that's more obvious that code. Nor did I imply drift as in a totally different direction - as I stated, the new routines would still work sometimes, but would differ in their approaches or use different variable names. Not all drift is critical or breaks things, but it's there. It's not an abstract.

So it didn't actually make decompilation too easy, as the headline suggests.

It made it easy to throw money at AI to create low-effort decompilation.