I’ve actually just started getting involved in the scene the "right" way. I’ve been practicing MIPS assembly and C coding for a while now, and I was really looking forward to finally understanding how my favorite games work under the hood. But now I’m genuinely concerned I’ve shown up too late.

Between the influx of AI slop and seeing central hubs like decomp.dev shut down, the sentiment on Lemmy makes it sound like the community aspect of decomp is completely dead. Then I go over to Reddit's /r/decomps and see people celebrating AI because it’s speeding up port releases.

I actually want to write the code. I want to understand the architecture, learn how these games function, and help build cool mods that are only possible when you have clean, human-readable source code. But I'm worried the whole space is getting flooded by people who just know how to prompt an LLM to spit out a barely functional port.

What is actually going to happen to the decomp scene? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for people who care about the craftsmanship, or are we watching a truly amazing community face an extinction event?