decomp.dev, the site that has tracked matching decompilation projects for hundreds of classic games since 2024, is shutting down its public index. Its creator, who posts as encounter, replaced the site's homepage earlier this week (October 14th) with a post titled "Sunsetting decomp.dev." In it, they explain that a wave of AI assisted forks and rushed PC ports has broken the community side of decompilation, and that a public leaderboard is now causing more harm than good.
The account behind the post belongs to Luke Street, whose GitHub profile is also encounter and who built objdiff, a local diffing tool for decompilation projects, and decomp-toolkit, a GameCube and Wii decompilation toolkit. The news spread quickly on X, where one widely shared post broke down the announcement:
What decomp.dev Tracked
Matching decompilation is the process of writing new source code in languages like C and C++ that compiles into the exact same binary as the original game. All of that code is written from scratch, and the goal is a byte for byte match with what shipped on the disc or cartridge. decomp.dev gave those projects one place to show progress, with a percentage bar for how much of each game's code had been matched and linked.
Before the shutdown, the index covered 13 platforms. GameCube had the most entries at 49, followed by the original PlayStation at 36, PlayStation 2 at 34, Wii at 30, and Nintendo 64 at 24. The last snapshot of the full index listed Super Smash Bros. Melee at 100% decompiled and fully linked, Pikmin 2 at 99.63%, Metroid Prime at 92.06%, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker at 79.45%. Projects for Final Fantasy VII, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Silent Hill 2, Gran Turismo 4, and Halo: Combat Evolved were also on the board.
How AI Changed Decompilation
The post walks through how quickly things shifted. Encounter writes that AI has been tested on decompilation for years with mixed results. Starting with Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 in early 2026, the models appeared to know the community's specific tools without being told how to use them, and could get decent results inside a clean, well documented codebase. Those results still needed a lot of human cleanup, and the cost per task was too high for what they produced.
Newer models like GPT-6-Astra pushed things much further. According to the post, they are far better at following complex directions, cross referencing symbols and debug information, and writing natural looking code. Encounter calls them "exceptionally good permuters" that can write small scripts testing many versions of the same code until one matches, and adds that they stay focused on long tasks and do it all faster and cheaper than earlier models. Their conclusion is that AI can speed up decompilation in a big way with the right guidance and code review, but that "the community aspect of decompilation has been broken."
Hostile Forks And Half-Baked Ports
The post lists three specific problems. The first is people forking existing projects to "finish" them with AI. Encounter points out that every project works differently, with some avoiding AI for legal or ethical reasons and others using it but not wanting low effort drive-by contributions, and writes that "these kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric."
The second is a race to release ports built on decompilations that the porters never worked on. "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 post reads. The third is the way the word itself has changed. Decompilation communities spent years framing the work as research into how these games were built, and encounter says "Sloptubers and subreddits like /r/decomps" have pushed "decomp" to simply mean "PC port."
That last point ties back to the site's original design. decomp.dev was built to gamify the work, since watching a percentage climb helped people stay motivated when every fraction took real effort. Encounter writes that the same idea has now "warped decompilation into a hollow numbers game" for people who want to burn tokens and push a number up.
What Happens Now
The site is not disappearing completely. Existing project pages and historical data will stay up, but the main index and the option to add new projects are disabled. The code behind decomp.dev was never open source, and encounter says nobody is allowed to fork or host a copy using it. As for why the site did not simply ban AI assisted projects, the answer is that "slop" is hard to define and harder to moderate, and a single hobbyist does not have the time or energy to judge hundreds of projects consistently.
Plenty of fans understand the decision even if they are sad to see the index go. One reply on X summed up that feeling:
The post closes by thanking everyone who contributed to the projects, communities, and tools over the years, saying the people and passion behind them were always what made the work fun and rewarding.
Was pulling the public leaderboard the right call, or should the decomp scene have found a way to live alongside AI assisted projects?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.