???

I can understand decomp.dev shutting down because it was mainly a tool to motivate the community, but decomp.wtf shutting down sounds silly. I find it hard to believe that someone made a tool for AI agents and then say "I didn't realize some people don't like AI". Why would he even make it if he's going to shut it down in a few days and be upset that people were using it? The original description straight up told people to use it to finish other people's public decomps, so it's not like he was considerate and careful about how the project was used until now.

I find that having lots of money makes many things very easy to acquire. That doesn't seem newsworthy to me.

I think the prevalence of AI use destroying small communities is newsworthy.

Could this be the future of decompiling other Pokémon games and even more complex titles?

Lmao pray whatever god you have that they won't remove or hike the subscription plan then.

AI is gonna destroy capitalism and non-capitalism alike. It is agnostic to political alignment.

Fair, but that's not exactly how the headline frames it. That's my only problem here.

That's fair, but it also got people to click through to the full story. It's a balance haha

Is there anywhere to follow these types of things? I’ve been seeing it all lately from third hand sources

AI doesn't build and maintain itself. Unless that changes, which I currently see no clear line of sight to, then it is just another asset primarily controlled and directed by rich people. Tools like that are always political.

https://decomp.wtf/ site has their statement, GitHub is archived.

Will see if it's still dead at the end of the week I guess.

This seems kind of sad.

It is sad! I've always loved being part of small communities and to see one get destroyed like this and so quickly is really sad.

Have you seen their RAM requirements? The AI is very fat indeed.

Why does the owner of decomp.dev sound so defeated? Aren't their legitimate decomp projects still existing and going strong?

EDITED to be a less charged question. Im realizing how devastating this situation actually is.And I'm quite sad to see something that I care so deeply for being destoyed

Iirc three AI devs announced a worm that both builds and maintains itself.

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

This kind of trend pushes those with the know how out of the scene like what is clearly happening.

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.

I agree that there will (probably) always be some amount of people that have passion enough to do these things themselves, but this is still a big problem as it erodes current infrastructure for the transfer of knowledge. The state of these scenes by the time the bubble finally bursts will likely be vastly diminished and in little state to help the new or tenacious people that are left.

So I don't disagree, but at the same time I also don't see many people relying on these vibe-coded apps, or including them in crucial points within software stacks. For example if a vibe-coded Mario Kart decomp project gets orphaned it doesn't really have widespread repercussions.

yes but it can be used by both sides to this end even though most people see it like a pathway to next stage of capitalism, it can also be the quite opposite

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."

Lemmy a year ago: "let's go open source clones, software should be free, fuck IP, fuck Nintendo and adobe"

Lemmy now: "no, not like that"

Reminds me of keto recipes for non keto foods. Looks mostly like the thing. Hardly tastes like it.

Do you really think this or do you need someone to explain to you why this isn't great?

Sure, explain why someone reverse engineering adobe software or older games and open sourcing it isn't great

If anyone is looking for alternatives that are useful it looks like recomp.fyi is doing a good job.

Because its worse code quality, also because you're fucking up hobbiest programming.

What do you think happens when everyone runs outta money to train the corporate frontier models, and open-weight models stop being given out as loss leaders?

Great way to lose a communal skillset to time, at least when we did this with space travel we had the excuse of not doing it in the same capacity for like 50 years because of the exorbitant expense.

I mean do you know what maintaining these things by hand will be like when we inevitably have to do so? The amount of drudging through spaghetti that'll have to happen?

What's your solution to that? Asking Claude to "fix the problem without making new ones, pretty please with a strawberry on top?"

My comp sci teachers/profs always said FORTRAN programmers made dough because the old guys who still knew it where dying off, despite it still being used for older financial systems.

Never expected that to happen to the then cutting-edge knowledge I've gained both from school and self study by the time I hit my early 30s.

But at least I know I'll probably have easy money coming to me in 3-5 years when the braindrain really hits :)

technically they work

turns out "technically correct" is the worst kind of correct

Yeah I was surprised to hear about how big the AI decomp wave was from my friends, because there was absolutely no buzz about it on lemmy.

Makes me wonder how many other things I miss because of using Lemmy instead of Reddit...

I don't disagree with the logic of what you're saying but the likelihood of it actually happening that way seems low given historical trends. There are lots of examples of things that could or should have helped working people live better lives but ended up primarily making rich people richer. I don't think AI is different in that respect.

We're commenting under an article that's directly reporting on the widespread repercussions we're facing.

People don't use AI as a tool which is the problem. They just ask it to do a job and don't analyze or do anything with the results. It's made people lazier about research. I'm not trusting what a machine decided should be there.

I once use AI to build a resume for me based off the one I already had and it just made shit up.

Sure yeah I guess if you want to consider a single video game community shutting down to be "widespread repercussions" you certainly have that right, but I don't think we'll be able to find common ground on this topic. Have a good one!

Out of interest, are you part of any decomp communities? As a contributor to one, I can absolutely confirm this is a period of turmoil with the rise of AI PRs, people doing low effort changes that weren’t even human verified etc.

Without wanting to sound gatekeepy, this was a niche community project I got into a few years ago where we were all researching and learning and communicating as a proper open source team, but it does feel like those days are mostly kinda over? Or at least most projects that might have spun up in such a way no longer will

And I think the main sadness here is I’m seeing this in my real life work and it’s now extending into my hobbyist projects too

Recomps didn't require AI, and those didn't take years to complete.

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.

First of all, lol.

Second of all, decompiling a binary in a clean room setting is not pointless just because leaked source code exists, because the decompilation can legally be used to make projects based on it whereas the leaked source code cannot be touched without facing the wrath of Nintendo lawyers.

Now, using AI to decompile a binary will likely not produce human-readable code, and will ultimately be pointless for things like studying code, producing high quality ports and mods, etc., but if a human or a group of humans did it, it can be extremely useful.

For that price, I could create my own GPU farm of local models, instead of wasting money on tokens.

I doubt legality is a shield against them suing you and honestly I'm not entirely sure they'd lose; many judges aren't technically literate enough to understand the difference between leaked source and decompiled. Better hope the lawyers you can afford are better than the ones they can.

Saw someone about a decomp that after $250k was only 80% accurate.

That said, it is a use case that AI should be viable for: a known source of truth that can be used to verify a guess and drive retries. It needs a lot of tries, hence token costs, but it should, given enough retries, be able to let much "get it".

Think the people assuming that clean room principles apply to this scenario are way too optimistic about the legality.

The most prominent clean room example was making a knockoff of the IBM BIOS. The thing is it was cloning a programming interface surface, and doing so with zero visibility into the object code, but instead an api reference written by people who did study the object code. Wine is even more clean room, guessing at a viable implementation based on black box observation of Windows behavior with zero understanding of the object code.

Translating object code into source code is not "clean room". But even if it were, we are talking about a deep clone down to the implementation and up through the human presentation. Not merely some programming interface details with a completely novel backend and with other code mostly owning the presentation to a human.

People keep thinking they find a technical loophole but consistently get shot down the millisecond a rights holder takes note.

See the myriad of fan projects that don't even try to clone a game engine but implement a game a new way, they get shut down hard.

I would be surprised if there is any case where direct use of decompiled code was ruled as "clean room" and transformative. People keep using that phrase without really understanding it.

Yeah, a big issue more broadly. Congratulations, it technically achieved a very narrow requirement, but unlike what we are used to, the result is difficult to take forward, neither human nor GenAI are able to reasonably modify the result in precise ways.

“Coring out the brain of humanity” is a phrase that comes to my mind more often these days.

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.

Sure yeah I guess if you want to consider a single video game community shutting down to be "widespread repercussions"

Yeah, I do. That you don't shows your point of view is too narrow to properly consider the implications.

And "we" didn't do anything. You're the one bailing after the slightest bit of push back with your snide comment. If you want to disengage, that's you're prerogative, but pretending to be civil and magnanimous when you're really just being dismissive of other viewpoints is underhanded.

Can't compare code quality for code that was never written. If someone reverse engineers a game that no one was working on with AI that code is better then nothing.

because you’re fucking up hobbiest programming.

Doesn't have to, I'm fully for having platforms for only humans and if someone wants to make a platform for reverse engineering without AI that's fine by me. Nothings stopping people from playing chess even though computers are objectively better at it now.

What do you think happens when everyone runs outta money to train the corporate frontier models, and open-weight models stop being given out as loss leaders?

The models will still exist. If anthropic goes bankrupt tomorrow the weights for opus 5 will still exist and be sold off to someone, it's not just going to disappear. Same with open weight models, plenty of people have them downloaded and can torrent them worst case scenario if the companies stop distributing them.

In general I think you're underestimating the capabilities of modern AI and overestimating the capabilities of your average developer. At this point properly made AI code is better and more maintainable then 90% of developers code.

Yeah it'll make it so you lose skills, but any technology that helps you will. Cars make people unable to walk as far, gps makes people dependent on their phone for directions, hell even shoes stop callouses and make it so you can't walk without them.

Even in programming we offload large parts of functionality to libraries we don't know the inner workings of.

Stack overflow probably atrophied programmers ability to think through a problem and read manuals, but overall it produces better code because, as any SO thread will show you, people come up with stupid solutions to problems and having a source to say what is the correct solution increases code quality as opposed to a programmer thinking through it to a naive solution.

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.

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.

I've been trying to get involved slowly. I've been teaching myself MIPS and C for a couple years now. I go onto decomp.me sometimes as I'm starting to get to know the process and looking at scratches.

So I get that my question might sound disingenuous, but I truly want to know if Im jumping into a sinking ship.