Sunsetting Decomp.dev

decomp.dev launched in 2024 to centralize matching decompilation progress and incentivize contributors through a gamified leaderboard. Advances in tooling and shared techniques sped work, but the arrival of powerful generative models changed the landscape: early models could assist but required costly human cleanup, while newer models like GPT-6-Astra can follow complex instructions, cross-reference symbols, and brute-force permutations across files to match machine code quickly and cheaply. Those capabilities make AI a powerful accelerator when paired with human review, yet they have also enabled harmful behaviors - hostile forks that finish others’ work with little effort, races to turn decompilations into quick ports, and widespread conflation of decompilation (research and preservation) with creating PC-ready ports. The leaderboard model that once motivated contributors has become a shallow numbers game amplified by token-burning, drive-by AI contributions, and community fracturing.

As a consequence, the public index and the ability to add new projects have been disabled; existing project pages and historical data remain accessible but the repo is proprietary and cannot be forked. Banning AI outright is rejected because AI can be a legitimate aid and “slop” is hard to define or enforce at scale for a solo maintainer. The decision preserves existing records, prevents further leaderboard-driven harm, and acknowledges gratitude to contributors while stepping away from managing growth and moderation.