Decompilation is one of the quieter, nerdier corners of this hobby: people painstakingly reverse-engineering old games into readable source code, mostly for preservation, mods and native PC ports. Decomp.dev has been the place that indexed those projects and tracked how far along each one was. Now its creator is switching the main index off, and they're putting it down to AI.
In a note on the site, the creator - who goes by @encounter - said the problem isn't AI in itself so much as how people have started using it. "The community aspect of decompilation has been broken," they wrote, adding that "bad actors have been abusing this in increasingly troublesome ways." The leaderboard, they reckon, had started doing more harm than good by turning careful, years-long work into a numbers game.
What's actually changing
The main index is disabled and you can no longer add new projects to it. Individual project pages and the historical data are staying up, so nothing's being wiped. It's a trim rather than a total shutdown.
It's a small story with a familiar shape. AI-assisted decomp sounds like a shortcut right up until you remember that half the point of the scene was that it was hard, and done by people who cared enough to do it by hand. VGC has the write-up, and @encounter's full statement is on decomp.dev itself.
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