decomp.dev shuts its shared project directory

A scoreboard has gone dark. decomp.dev is a site that tracks the progress of "matching decompilation" projects (turning a game's compiled code back into source code that compiles to the identical result). It has shut its shared project directory, and with it the leaderboard view with the progress bars. No new projects are being added either. The decision came in a notice titled "Sunsetting decomp.dev" that the founder, encounter, put on the front page. The day it was published isn't clear. The first reports appeared on 15-16 October.

According to its founder, the site, which opened in 2024, hosts hundreds of projects. Those projects are still tracked; their pages and their history stay where they are. The sister sites decomp.me and ghidra.decomp.dev are still running too.

The reason is AI. Since early 2026 new models have sped up the matching work quite a bit, but cleaning up the output still takes a lot of human labour. According to the founder, copies known as "hostile forks" take projects that people have been running for years, "finish" them with AI and rush out ports that never went through any quality control. These copies leave the community neither research nor documentation. The leaderboard does more harm than good. The founder isn't banning AI tools outright, on the grounds that policing every project one by one isn't practical. The site's code isn't open, and all rights are reserved. The founder asks that the code not be forked and that no copy of it be hosted anywhere else.

I think it's the right call. If you want the race to stop, you take down the scoreboard.