AI ATE THEIR HOBBY — THE GAME DECOMPILERS JUST SURRENDERED

Decomp.dev, a site launched in 2024 that tracked human efforts to reverse-engineer and decompile video games and gamified progress with completion percentages, said Thursday it is shutting down because the community aspect of decompilation has been broken by AI. Its administrator, who goes by Encounter, said projects that once required years of intense collaboration can now be done trivially, and it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which are done by AI.

Encounter wrote that recent frontier models are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information and writing natural code, so AI can expedite decompilation with the right guidance and review. The break came from how people used that ability: forking existing projects to finish them with AI against the original teams' wishes, and racing to release half-baked ports to take credit for work human contributors had done.