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.”
Feeds fire into the problem, great job decomp.dev. As someone already pointed out, not everyone will spend 56k worth of tokens.
I dislike genAI as much as the rest of you, but…
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Oh no, ai killing hobbies and art and fun oh nooo such a surprise if only anybody had seen this comingggg
I think the AI luddites are playing into the hands of the wealthy, if they aren’t actually secret allies.
The problems with AI boil down to individuals having too much personal influence over humanity, no different from personal ownership of factories, banks, politicians, PMCs, and churches.
Everyone telling me and other weak individuals to not use AI, are basically trying to strangle a new form of democracy in the cradle.
My friend. That chatbot isnt giving you individual freedom. It’s owned by a billionaire that is cooking our planet, and it is being tasked with doing the fun creative jobs faster than you.
The end goal isn’t individual democracy. It’s to make you work 10 hour shifts in the lithium mines to pay for your weekly subscription to Claude v47, which will make soulless content for you to absorb in the short period between your mining job, and the second job you need to pay for food and rent.
I use a local AI open weight model, Qwen Next-Flash. I don’t pay for a subscription, and it isn’t doing the ‘fun creative jobs’, it is digging through code and building programs.
You’re not a programmer are you.
Nope. Math and coding aren’t my passions. Leave that stuff to the people who enjoy doing those things, or to AI.
Far as I am concerned, the important thing is the result, not the process. I don’t have the money to hire a person, so it falls to AI to realize my intentions.
“Coring out the brain of humanity” is a phrase that comes to my mind more often these days.
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.
Yeah, more people need to be taught that generative AI models are literally auto-correct like on their phones. It is the gigantic, multi-trillion-dollar, ultra high tech, ultra high powered version of auto correct, but that’s what it is. Would they trust something important that, sight unseen?
For those of us who write code, it can be handy to have an auto correct that can suggest chunks of code rather than just the next word or filling in a partially typed variable name. But you have to treat it like a suggestion, and read the suggestion, and make a conscious decision about whether that is how you want it. Giving up your agency is bad, but that is what a huge portion of the population seems to want to do at every turn. Not having to do anything is a nice-sounding option to have, but it’s not good for your brain or body.
But on top of that, as an engineer, you are also losing out on familiarity with the design when you give up that agency. I find that when I let the neural net in my head – the one made out of actual neurons – get more exposure to the internal workings of a system, it is better at helping me diagnose problems with our product more quickly and intuitively.
and don’t analyze
see: “decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original”
when the C code creates byte-wise identical output, then there is not much need to analyse. The code is already as good as it gets, or at least there is not much room for improvement.
or do anything with the results.
see: “People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on”
If anyone is looking for alternatives that are useful it looks like recomp.fyi is doing a good job.
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”
AI decompilation is not free software. You’re relying on proprietary models, for one thing. And you’re starting from a proprietary base program. Sure, you might get something usable at the end, but “free software” means you don’t get sued for it either.
You’re relying on proprietary models, for one thing
The development of the software requires propietary models, not the software itself. If I use windows with a propietary IDE to develop software and make it open source that software is still free, even if the build and development system requires propietary software.
means you don’t get sued for it either.
Clean room rebuilds are legal under copyright law. If you can prove that you didn’t see the source and only made something based off observing it’s functionality that is allowed.
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
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?”
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.
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.
We know AI produces unmaintainable spaghetti, having LLM-generated versions reduces incentive for human programmers to make their own version.
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.
The community mentioned in the article did that, found it was untennable, and decided to shut down over it…
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.
That’s nice, but what happens in a coupla years when languages and libraries continue to be updated and your model isn’t trained for them? How long can you bodge together it to work with until you have to train something new? Who will handle the cost of that?
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.
Does that still count when you talk about people who have been developing for 5 years? For 10?
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.
Both of those are common skills that can be built up over a matter of weeks to months at most, as opposed to niche professional skills which take years to build.
Even in programming we offload large parts of functionality to libraries we don’t know the inner workings of.
Yeah that’s why I’ve always used as little third party code in my personal projects as possible, I’ve never been a fan of over using other peoples code.
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.
First off, programmers have had forums to ask questions since the Usenet days. Granted, most of them never got near how big stack overflow was even 10 years ago.
These forums are double edged sword for education, yes you can copy and paste, but the best answers where posted by experienced devs clearly and carefully explaining what and why they did.
Because unlike an LLM, they understand WHY they’re doing what they’re doing.
When used properly I would argue stack overflow, like any other good documentation, can make you a better programmer, not worse.
Why does the guy who owned decomp.dev act like this is the end of the world? Plenty of legitimate decomp projects still exist and going strong still.
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
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.
I think it’s just harder to find projects that aren’t slop drops. I don’t want to sound like these communities don’t exist (currently) but it’s hard not to worry about the future.
But I do also believe in the power of communities to organise around a common goal. If there’s a game you like why not start a project and find others that share your goal… just be prepared that there is a lot of fending off of low quality slop right now, and the expectations of the general public for something to get released quickly is at an all time high.
Contributing to a human led decomp project has been one of the most rewarding and enjoyable things I’ve done
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.
Is there anywhere to follow these types of things? I’ve been seeing it all lately from third hand sources
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…
AI is gonna destroy capitalism and non-capitalism alike. It is agnostic to political alignment.
It is agnostic to political alignment.
Prog doesn’t read theory🤣. Hey bourgeoisie, do you own the means of your Markov machine?
Your question is unrelated to the statement I made. Does the “Markov machine” care if I own the means or not? Of all the tech advancements made to serve the billionaires, AI is perhaps the only one non billionaires were able to use in retribution, hence why they are scrambling to pass all these regulations regarding it and creating dooms day scenerios (apart from the PR aspect)
Also it is not a Markov machine really (seems like you are using random technical words to look clever), if you have seen Markov chain text generators you will quickly spot the difference.
only one non billionaires were able to use in retribution
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.
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.
Open weight models can be run by anyone with the hardware, and many models can run on residential hardware. Rich people sure think they are going to control it, but it’s not clear that’s going to be the outcome.
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 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.
Iirc three AI devs announced a worm that both builds and maintains itself.
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.
???
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’ve seen lots of deeply AI fanatic behavior where they are entirely oblivious to how obnoxious other people are finding their output.
This case seems like they did some reflection and internalized the situation, which is nice to see. Most decent folks step back when they realize they are actively shitting on the work of people they respect. Hence AI slop being relatively more popular among sociopathic folks.
Note there is a reasonable difference between AI use and slop, but the “lazy didn’t give a shit” nature of AI slopists means they can produce way more volume than the more quality users.
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.
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.
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”.
Yeah but is there really any value in something like that? Maybe for corporate espionage, I guess, but that 250k is still heavily subsidized; these AI companies are hemorrhaging money. What happens when the capex fountain runs dry; is anyone going to pay a million dollars in tokens to get an 80% accurate decomp of an old pokemon game?
Oh I think it is shit, especially reading that 250k and the result was still 20% off of target in a scenario that should, in theory, be right in GenAI’s wheelhouse.
Btw the decomp I was referencing was of the original modern warfare 2 from 2009.
Btw the decomp I was referencing was of the original modern warfare 2 from 2009.
lol, amazing. This is what we get out of these datacenters burning tons of diesel. Everything is just so stupid.
For that price, I could create my own GPU farm of local models, instead of wasting money on tokens.
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.
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 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.
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.
cost the guy $56k worth of tokens
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.
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”.
I don’t think burning a years salary on this is “easy”.
Burning money is actually quite easy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What can affect AAA can affect indies too, let’s not forget that.
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.
