A site called decomp.dev, which tracks hundreds of fan projects to rebuild the code of video games, has stopped taking new projects. The hobbyist who runs it, known as encounter, wrote in a statement on the site that, with the right guidance and human review, recent AI models can now speed up that work significantly, and that people misusing them have broken the community that grew up around the hobby. The site will keep tracking the projects already on it, and their pages and history stay online, but its main list is switched off.
The hobby is decompiling: turning the binary code a computer runs back into text that programmers can read and change. Companies usually sell software only as binary code and keep the original text, called source code, secret, so fans who want to understand how a game works, or move it to new machines, rebuild that code themselves. The projects decomp.dev tracks aim for an exact match: rebuilt code that turns back into the very same program and could pass for what the game's original makers wrote. Reaching that has historically been, in encounter's words, "a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors."
AI models released early in 2026, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI's GPT-5.4, already seemed to know the community's tools, encounter writes, but their work needed a lot of human cleanup and cost too much for what it produced. Newer ones such as OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, the statement says, follow complex directions better, write natural-looking code when given enough guidance, write small programs that try many versions of a piece of code until one matches, and stay on track through long jobs, all faster and more cheaply than earlier models. With "the right guidance, human input, and code reviews," the operator concludes, AI can now speed up decompiling "in a significant way."
Rebuilt games have caught Microsoft's attention too. In a memo to Xbox staff that Microsoft published on Oct. 13, Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma wrote that in recent weeks games had been "rapidly decompiled and rebuilt" to run on hardware they were never designed for, with Windows games translated to run on Apple's own chips or inside web browsers. She added that "many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another," with parts of one game worked into a different one. She called easier access to games, new life for old ones and more players becoming creators "unmistakably good outcomes for players," even when they challenge Xbox's existing business models, and set up Xbox Labs, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists, to explore those possibilities. Coding became the first major job for AI agents, AI systems that carry out tasks on their own, because they can write, run and test software, she wrote, and games share many of the same traits.
The operator says AI is not the problem by itself and "can help tremendously when used correctly." The trouble, encounter writes, is "bad actors": some copy volunteers' projects and "finish" them with AI, while others race to release "half-baked, barely-functional" versions of games for other machines, built on work they never contributed to. The site was built to turn progress into a game that kept volunteers motivated, but the operator writes that the same idea has warped decompiling into "a hollow numbers game," and that the site, as a public list and leaderboard, is now "causing more harm than good."
Decompiling is not only for games: security experts use the same method to check programs whose original code they can't see. Sharma's memo says Xbox remains committed to being "responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it." IP, short for intellectual property, here means the game series Xbox owns, such as Halo and Call of Duty. It is not yet clear what Xbox Labs will build, or how Microsoft and other game companies will treat fan-made versions of their games.