With the burgeoning decomp and recomp scene now inundated with low-effort AI slop, a notable community tool is shutting down. Developer Luke "encounter" Street is closing decomp.dev, a site that once tracked decompilations of classic games, citing the negative effects AI has had on the community.
Decomp.dev tracks – or, rather, tracked – the painstaking, human-driven process of decompilation across dozens of games. As each line of code was recreated and matched with functions from the original game, a percentage meter would tick up gradually until it reached the coveted 100% mark. But this simple celebration of human effort has gotten a lot more complicated with the rise of AI.
"It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way," Street writes in the announcement. "What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken. Our projects have always been open source to encourage contributions and to benefit the community as a whole. Bad actors have been abusing this in increasingly troublesome ways."
Those abuses include "forking existing decompilation projects to 'finish' them with AI," even if that goes against the wishes of the developers who started the project in the first place. Street also notes that some AI-first devs are "racing to port games" ahead of traditional developers. "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 terms "decomp" and "recomp" have been used more or less interchangeably in recent times, but here it's important to define the terms specifically. Decompilation is the process of painstakingly reverse-engineering a game's code, recreating every one of the game's functions line by line. Devs can then recompile that code, often using it to port those games to new platforms.
"For years, decompilation communities attempted to establish that decompilation is primarily for research: we love these games and want to understand how they work, and to uncover the mysteries that the original developers left behind," Street says. "That's not to say that ports aren't fun too; they're just not the sole reason a decompilation exists."
The terminology was further complicated by the advent of static recompilation tools, which essentially skip the decompilation process entirely, automatically translating the original code into a format that could run on modern PCs. Then AI entered the picture, and the barrier to creating static recompilation-based PC ports went from "low" to "essentially nonexistent."
"decomp.dev was originally designed to gamify decompilation: watching the progress go up was a fun way to stay motivated when every fraction of a percent took real human effort," Street continues. "Today, that same idea has warped decompilation into a hollow numbers game, exacerbated by folks who just want to burn tokens to make number go up or 'port game to PC', all else be damned. While the increased attention has brought in genuine folks who want to learn and contribute meaningfully, I believe that decomp.dev serving as a public index and leaderboard is now causing more harm than good."
The community's love of recomps has gotten so strong that even Microsoft seems to want in on it, and AI is certainly making these recomps easier to build. But for many in the community, it's also wrecking the beauty of the effort that it took to get here in the first place, with real, human time and effort on display in the form of these massive decompilation projects, and an emphasis on the work rather than just the output. Here's hoping the old guard continues doing the work the old-fashioned way.
