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u/__Player__ 1h ago
the problem here is that people who complete a recompilation with AI are spitting on work that the community has worked on for years. a lot of the ports we see today are part of a partially decompiled or statically recompilation projects, and of course, they are incomplete. but due to recent AI advances, random people with an AI subscription can make work a half ass port of a game.
i have always been against these kind of ports for this very same reason, they are broken, lack support and perform very poorly. it's just the definition of Slop.
though i have to admit, i never saw it on the original devs side until now, obviously i would be unhappy if AI used the work that me, or a team around me worked for months or years, and basically finished the project in a few days without our involvement, that's just fucked.
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u/Damaniel2 7h ago
GenAI destroying yet another thing I enjoy. Thanks, clankers.
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u/crhone 6h ago
the future is now old man
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u/Immediate_Idea2628 5h ago
The future is looking grim, young sprout.
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u/crhone 5h ago
not for decompilation scene from what I see
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u/Immediate_Idea2628 4h ago
The article itself mentions how even code matching ai decomps arent the same as human made and checked decomps. Like everything ai coded, it "works". There might be a day where this whole thing collapses on itself because of unmaintainable ai code.
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u/Ill_Carry_44 1h ago
decompilation is about turning the game's machine code into human readable code. There is no "it works" in that case. The only real comparison is decompilation producing the BIT EXACT outputs as the real game.
Ports based on decompilation is another story but that's like not even the important part.
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u/FatPsychopathicWives 4h ago
That would maybe be true if the models never improved and they somehow all vanished.
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u/t0rchic 3h ago
Considering their monetary projections I would put odds on the models all disappearing lol
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u/FatPsychopathicWives 1h ago
And all the open source models, you think those disappear too? And Google and Meta stop even though they have enough money to go for ever? Nothing will go away, and the government won't let OpenAI or Anthropic fail.
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u/Immediate_Idea2628 41m ago
How are the open source models going to get trained if no ones training them? Google and Meta aren't going to burn money infinitely just to keep AI alive. They exist to make money. The only possible argument is government bail out, but whether they'll do that or not is up in the air.
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u/FatPsychopathicWives 8m ago edited 4m ago
China won't stop and the open models are already capable enough that if they didn't get any better they would still be heavily used. Google definitely will keep going with AI and Quantum until they succeed. There's absolutely 0% chance AI goes away completely.
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u/Arctiiq 3h ago
Screw AI and everything it stands for. I need the bubble to pop so we can get our hobbies back
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u/Chimbondaowns 1h ago
I'm affraid a bubble popping is not what you think. Actually the bubble itself isn't what you think.
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u/These_Day_2250 6h ago
AI destroying yet another thing that was great. I'm sure the AI bros are gonna come out of the woodwork claiming it's a good thing it happened or some bullshit.
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u/Ill_Carry_44 3h ago
people are forking decomp to finish them and port them without contributing to them
Why is the whole open source community an ego thing now, isn't that the point of open source? And assuming those fork are also public, it shouldn't bother anyone...
it's basically
other people are benefiting from open source
?????
And then there are people saying they spent 10 years on a decomp but AI can do the same work in a month and somehow that's a bad thing
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u/tropix126 2h ago edited 1h ago
I don't think this is necessarily saying it's a bad thing for end-users or people who simply seek results, but AI has most definitely decayed the community aspect of decompilation beyond repair. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is another discussion. The key part of the sentence you quoted is "without contributing to them".
decomp.dev was clearly a tool oriented towards these sorts of developer communities. If that kind of workflow truly is no longer needed, then there's no reason for it to exist. That's is simply what's happening in the name of progress, and hopefully you can at least empathize with people who aren't happy about this even if their replacement benefits you personally. A lot of people worked on this stuff for fun and as a hobby, and if it's no longer fun then they're going to leave. The stance isn't really "people shouldn't be allowed to fork our repos", rather "people are forking our repos and doing the work for us, so why even bother building a community around a passion project that no longer demands passion".
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u/Squibbles01 2h ago
Fuck AI. Fuck every slopper polluting the world.
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u/MatiasArg09 1h ago
Que triste, Yo estoy bien a gusto disfrutando algunos ports que salen. Sigue llorando 👋
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u/ArkoSammy12 5m ago
Gente como tu solo ayuda a destruir las comunidades como estas. Quedate callado y déjanos en paz.
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u/mmkzero0 8h ago edited 8h ago
I can understand where the author is coming from, and I sympathize with the frustration, but like, I can’t help feeling that this could have been handled differently.
Why not continue decomp.dev as a curated, quality assessed index? Require projects to demonstrate actual technical competence, reproducible results, proper attribution, and ongoing maintenance before being manually accepted. Judge the engineering and its quality, not whether AI was involved.
I feel like there’s a bit of the usual “new technology bad” sentiment creeping into this discussion. AI has made knowledge and capabilities more accessible than ever, but access to powerful tools doesn’t automatically translate into domain expertise. There’s still a massive difference between someone blindly generating code and someone who actually understands reverse engineering, compiler behavior, and the systems they’re working with, while using AI to accelerate their work.
And regarding forks, isn’t that fundamentally part of open source? Obviously proper attribution and respecting licenses matter, but forks taking projects in new directions shouldn’t inherently be treated as something negative.
I absolutelyy understand that maintaining and curating such an index takes time and effort, especially for one person. But perhaps inviting trusted community members to take over, introducing stricter submission requirements, or moving toward community-driven curation could have been alternatives worth exploring.
Ultimately, I respect the author’s decision. It’s their project and their time. I just find it unfortunate that the response to a changing technological landscape seems to be retiring a useful resource rather than adapting it. To me at least, the answer to increasingly accessible tooling is better verification and higher quality standards, not retreating from the technology itself.
Edit: minor spelling mistake, oh well
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u/BagMostlyWater 7h ago
AI has made knowledge and capabilities more accessible than ever
In my experience it makes it harder to communicate and harder to learn. It spreads misinformation much better than knowledge.
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u/mmkzero0 6h ago
I would account this to a general lack of the broader average persons critical thinking and cross checking ability. People were already nut confirming things before AI.
Now it’s worse because that lack gets highlighted much more.
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u/TheKrzysiek 5h ago
You clearly haven't seen most social media, even before AI
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u/BagMostlyWater 5h ago
We're not talking about social media; we're talking about technical projects.
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u/skewp 7h ago
Ultimately, I respect the author’s decision.
The rest of your post kind of makes it sound like you don't.
the answer to increasingly accessible tooling is better verification and higher quality standards
Meaning a lot more work for the maintainer of the repository. This is literally answered in their post.
I feel like if you actually respected their decision you'd bother to read and understand their entire post before criticizing the decision.
They explicitly stated in their post that they're not against AI, but AI decomps make it easier for people who have little care or investment to make extremely disruptive "drive by" contributions, which makes the moderation aspect too time consuming to handle.
This is actually a massive problem for basically every open source project these days, and the main reason many of those projects go "no AI allowed at all". Not because they're morally or philosophically against AI but because it's too much work trying to sift through mountains of AI generated garbage pull requests by people who don't give a fuck and have their AI agents respond to code reviews and comments rather than bother to post themselves (because they literally do not understand what is in their own pull request).
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u/mmkzero0 6h ago
> The rest of your post kind of makes it sound like you don’t.
That’s a rather unfair interpretation. Respecting someone’s decision doesn’t mean agreeing with it or considering it beyond criticism. I can absolutely respect the author’s right to discontinue their project while still believing there were alternatives worth exploring. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
> Meaning a lot more work for the maintainer of the repository. This is literally answered in their post.
Which I explicitly acknowledged. I never demanded that the author take on additional work. My point was that alternatives could have been explored, including inviting trusted community members to take over stewardship, introducing stricter submission criteria, or transitioning to community-driven curation. Whether those alternatives were feasible is another question entirely.
And yes, I read the entire post. I also never claimed the author was fundamentally against AI. You’re responding to positions I haven’t actually taken.
As for AI-generated PRs, I agree that low-quality drive-by contributions are a genuine problem, and AI certainly makes producing them easier and faster. But ultimately, it’s still people submitting work they don’t understand or cannot validate. That’s a contributor accountability problem, amplified by AI, rather than something inherently wrong with AI-assisted development.
There’s a substantial difference between someone blindly submitting generated code and someone with actual domain expertise using AI as an engineering tool. Treating both as equivalent is precisely the distinction I was arguing against.
You’re welcome to disagree with my proposed alternatives, but I’d appreciate engaging with what I actually argued rather than questioning whether I read the announcement or respect its author.
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u/AnonTwo 6h ago
That’s a contributor accountability problem, amplified by AI, rather than something inherently wrong with AI-assisted development.
I think the highlighted part is the problem
Yes, it's something that always was an issue. AI exacerbated the issue by making it faster and easier to create those poor submissions.
Like you acknowledge what the problem is but kindof...ignore it too? Like adapt as in what? If you read it they basically were doing decomps for fun,and AI was being used to basically...just get it out the door as soon as possible
You know, like it says in the post you say you've read.
Like I actually went to read it before I posted this and realized "Oh wait no this does not adapt to AI", like this is basically passion projects being disrupted by people who just want to get it done.
Also as he says, he's a hobbyist, and adapt in this case would basically mean getting sizable moderation whose job is just to sift through slop. Does that sound like something you do as a hobby, or work?
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u/mmkzero0 6h ago
I actually agree with much of what you’re saying, particularly that AI has exacerbated an already existing problem. But I think we’re identifying different root causes.
Poor-quality code, insufficient testing, and inadequate verification existed long before LLMs. Humans were, are and always will be perfectly capable of producing “slop” without AI. What has changed is the sheer volume and speed at which code can now be produced, while our practices for reviewing, testing, and validating that code haven’t necessarily kept pace.
That’s precisely my pointy: we’ve dramatically increased code generation throughput without proportionally improving verification throughput. AI amplifies an existing engineering problem, but the responsibility still lies with the people submitting work they neither understand nor adequately validate.
And I’m not ignoring the moderation burden. I explicitly acknowledged it, and I fully respect that someone maintaining a hobby project may simply not want to deal with it. That’s entirely reasonable.
What I’m questioning is whether discontinuation was the only viable option. Could stewardship have been transferred to trusted community members? Could the index have continued under a different, more selective model? I’m not claiming those solutions would be effortless or even necessarily successful, merely that they were alternatives worth considering.
I also think there’s an important distinction between deliberately disrupting someone’s passion project and independently building upon publicly available work. Not every AI-assisted fork or accelerated decompilation is inherently malicious, disrespectful, or devoid of genuine technical understanding.
Ultimately, I understand why the author made this decision. I simply think it’s unfortunate that a valuable community resource is being retired, and I believe the broader conversation should focus more on contributor accountability and verifiable engineering quality than on the tools involved.
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u/Anew_Returner 5h ago
That’s a rather unfair interpretation
I mean, your post is already working under the unfair assumption he didn't consider any other alternatives, and on top of that implies this was a 'new technology bad' kneejerk reaction.
It doesn't read particularly respectful, more like a heavy handed guilt tripping attempt at getting him to share his project when he has already stated he doesn't want to.
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u/mmkzero0 5h ago
If that’s your extent of interpreting a legitimate argument in which I deliberately assign the maintainer full autonomy while myself being capable of still disagreeing with parts of it then I don’t know how to help you.
Just because I am capable to maintain a nuanced take and dare question if there could have been other avenues doesn’t make me disrespectful.
And I never wrote it was a ‘new tech bad’ reaction - my literal wording was it had hints of the sentiment. I am sure the maintainer didn’t give up their beloved project lightly. But if it really mattered to them I am still allowed to question why no other options have been explored or discussed.
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u/Margen67 3h ago
If they care so much about the community why not open source it and let others take on the mantle?
Doing this won't make AI go away.
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u/zarafff69 7h ago
“Can I fork and host my own version of decomp.dev?
No. decomp.dev's repository has never had an open source license, and I continue to reserve all rights to the (entirely human written) code. Any replica must not use decomp.dev's code in any form.
“
Why not open source it right now? What?
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u/Cold_Soft_4823 7h ago
cuz you aren't owed shit, make your own project
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u/DracoMagnusRufus 5h ago
Are you confused by the concept of questions? Asking why someone does or doesn't do something isn't a demand. It's a question. It's looking for understanding their unclear thought process.
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u/zarafff69 7h ago
Man, these anti AI people are crazy… At least AI people opensource their stuff for the most part…
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u/Sure_Breath_2273 6h ago
What the hell are you talking about? Most AI projects I've seen are closed source, whoever asked Claude or whatever else to churn out the code can't be bothered to maintain a github repo because "it's too much effort"
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u/Margen67 3h ago
If a vibecoder is too lazy or incompetent to use git the project probably isn't worth using anyway.
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u/ExiledHyruleKnight 5h ago edited 5h ago
For years, decompilation communities attempted to establish that decompilation is primarily for research:
I don't understand this post... It sounds like "Hey decompilation means something and people are getting it confused... I'm going to leave because..." like if you believe decompilation and ports are different (they are) then fucking keep your voice and mission statement clear.
I support AI (and this guy seems to too, he says AI isn't the problem). But I also support people who want to make a differentiation between vibe coding and what they support, as long as it's not done as an insult. (It's ok to say you prefer no-AI, it's kind of a douche thing to say anything with AI is worthless, or belittle others because they used AI for anything).
Kind of a shame to see this guy close up shop because if you care about the research of the games, that's what we should be talking about here.
But much like Napster, one closes, many more will open. Such as https://bytematch.dev/ and https://decompilati.onl/ (the later is a bit lacking but give it time)
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u/messyhess 5h ago
I understand and respect the grief that people are going through and will have to go through in many other fields, but the process is still there. We can still have fun trying to make well designed, documented tools that humans can understand and learn from instead of relying on AI black box code. Then we can use these cute human tools to decompile instead. If you tell me that it is not fun to design and make these tools, even if you use AI help, then you don't enjoy the process of organizing, reading and understanding code which is fine.
Maybe by enjoying and learning you mean that you can't have the joy of discovering tricks anymore because AI figured them out and all that is left is understanding those tricks and organizing code in a human readable and maintainable way, which you don't think it is fun. It is understandable that you can't see decompilation as a fun game anymore and that is a loss. But I want to remind others that we can still have games and human competitions for that thrill of discovering things faster than others.
Now this is for the people that think software is dying, yadayada: let's imagine that someday AI is able to write perfect, well designed, human understandable, well documented software, totally unguided. Someone will still need to fully read and understand that code right? Only a human can evaluate if something is human-understandable. Human understandable code has no reason to exist otherwise. So even then we need people that fully understands and enjoy code. I'm 100% sure that we will never just accept blackbox code from AI and blindly trust it in the future. Sure for little things today like games people are hyped with executing random code but that is because they are not aware of the dangers of trusting the vibe-coder and the AI that created it. We will soon definitely start seeing cases of people getting scammed or being used as a bot, for executing random vibe-coded software.
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u/enilea 4h ago
What's this site? When I google it or the name + reddit all the results are about it shutting down, did it actually have a big following?
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u/ykafia 1h ago
No, the point was to help the few people that had decomp as a hobby. It's very niche website for people of a specific community, but it has been overtaken with vibe coded projects the past few months and that has created some extra noise that they didn't want. Would be like a few guys going to a monument crochet club and using a machine to crochet all the monuments of the world faster than the club can.
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u/Icy-Concentrate2076 8h ago edited 8h ago
A lot of things that seem like means to an end are someones passion, their hobby, their opportunity to learn. 99% of the people will look at a decomp as an avenue to recompiling it to their Android phone just to play the game, but before AI usually the people who did decomps didn't care that much about recomp, but mostly understand how the game they loved was built. A recomp was simply a byproduct of having the source code, and usually it wasn't even the people who made the decomp that did the recomp porting work.
Even if AI is perfect and can do a much better work than humans (which it seems to be the case rn in decomps), a human doesn't learn anything from an AI decomp. Sure, you can have the AI explain it to you, but arriving at the understanding yourself is much easier for humans to learn. Not to mention that usually these decomps are sloppy, simply because the creator doesn't really care about readability, but byte matching. Of course, they could spend more AI tokens to make the code more readable, but seems like most of them don't really care about that. Of course the end result is the same. But before and after an AI decomp, there's 0 new humans that understand how the game works internally, how it was built, what sort of structures exist in the code. Believe it or not, a lot of people cared about that. To them, piecing a decomp together was like a puzzle. Would you like it if AI solved a puzzle for you? Maybe it can do it a lot faster, maybe it can explain the solution perfectly, but you lose all of the satisfaction of getting there yourself.
All this to say, enjoy your vibecoded decomps and recomps, but I want to try to give a perspective as to why some people mourn the death of manual decomp.