AI-built decompilations reach Pokémon
Ports and code rebuilds made with LLM agents now cover several Pokémon games, and decompilation hobbyists aren't happy.
Kotaku reports that AI-assisted decompilation has reached Pokémon, with projects covering Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon Snap, and HeartGold and SoulSilver. Decompilation means turning a game's compiled code back into source code that people can read and rebuild.
The decomp.dev site's owner told Kotaku that the AI rush has broken the community side of the hobby. Kotaku also points to 404 Media's finding that many of these AI projects are buggy and low quality.
Decomps.net reports that one HeartGold project, a fork labelled "Built with LLM agents", rebuilds both US versions byte for byte. It says 99.25% of the code bytes are attributed to C or C++. The long-running pret team doesn't accept AI-written code in its own projects, and you need your own copy of the game to build any of them.
Sources: Kotaku · Decomps.net