Decompilation on Steroids: Why AI Is Suddenly Cracking Open Old Software
Over the past few weeks, several reverse-engineering efforts have crossed major milestones. GoldenEye 007, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and Halo: Combat Evolved all reached them. Another developer, running a fleet of 17 AI agents, rebuilt a playable 2009 Call of Duty from its compiled executable.
But it's not just games. Open-source clones of Adobe apps showed up on GitHub almost overnight. Earlier in the year, a single blog post about COBOL knocked IBM's stock off a cliff. These might look like separate stories, but they share one common thread: AI has sharply cut the cost of understanding old code, as long as something can check its work.
So yes, AI is a big part of it, but it's not the whole story. Three things converged.
TL;DR: why this is happening now
- Years of human groundwork were already in place
Many of today's headlines sit on decompilations volunteers spent five or...
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