AI is just a tool, if your ability to form relationships was easily displaced by a tool, then I'd say it says a lot about the ability rather than the tool. It's the same argument of hand drill vs a drilling machine. No different. The ability to form relationships have always been with us. Instead of discussing in depth about code, perhaps it is going to be more along the lines of models, variants, self hosting, etc.
You can draw a line from Xenowhirl's disassembly of Sonic 1 and Simon Wai's research of the Sonic 2 prototype to the creation of Sonic Mania and the blossoming fangame / ROM hacking community, and from there the careers of a lot of indie devs. It's not that these people aren't capable of talking to each other, it's that they get to know each other in a personal and professional context by bonding over a project they have a shared passion over. If these disassemblies just popped up on GitHub one day, and if the fan games and the ROM hacks were created by solo devs with an AI model... well, we end up with quite a few neat projects. But we don't end up with the rich, vibrant communities that get created in the inherent process of collaborating on a project.
Of course, in a post-AI world people will still want to work together on things. But these sorts of tools do disincentivize it. That's the point I'm getting at here.
I think people who are doing these decomps aren't necessarily passionate about them to that extent. If they were a huge fan of the history of Sonic, they could use the resources now available to see how the game works, but they would also be internally driven to go beyond just a dump of the game's code on a repo. AI cannot decompile the social history of these games and the stories of the people who made them. It's just a matter if the person actually cares about that. Who knows what drives such an unusual amount of passion.
I feel a lot of these decomps were created by people not as passionate as your examples, because they are only showing up now, not in the pre-AI era. There is a flood of AI decomps only now because AI has lowered the barrier enough to where a project a person could not be passionate enough about to spend years of their limited time on Earth toiling on it is now easily accomplishable. It's a huge ask to put years of your life towards one thing. People might have obligations, work, family, children, more important hobbies, yet still wish one day they could get around to that one project, but couldn't find a way of prioritizing it over other things. I can't fault them for that. Now they can get it done in a month and still have time for other things that matter to them.
The claim is "we lose the rich communities that only exist from manual work." I still think the people who want those communities, like the people who still create art by hand in spite of the existence of diffusion, will keep doing their own thing. They were going to from the start, AI or not, but now that AI is a thing the separation is clearer to people on the outside, since they are seen to not rely on AI.
The communities that will appear because we can now organize AI decomp projects wouldn't have appeared at all with the barrier so high, had it not been easy enough to start them. The blocker was other obligations and not having the time to devote that was intrinsically required to finish them by hand, with the vast majority of people still being a member of outer society.
Dare I say it, maybe not all of the people into reverse engineering really enjoyed the process. It's just they put up with learning it because if you wanted to modernize an abandoned game in the pre-AI era, you had no choice but to learn those things. Only the people with the interest and patience remained, and those are the examples we are able to point to, while the people with only enough passion to get it done with AI assistance left a while ago and are only now reappearing.
> perhaps it is going to be more along the lines of models, variants, self hosting, etc.
Unfortunately those are also better discussed with LLMs.
I recently had to refresh on some algorithms and some manual coding for an interview where using LLM is forbidden. It was super fun, I forgot how fun solving software puzzles can be!
It’s unfortunate our industry has become so boring. Because our society values capital above all else, quitting my job to do something fun would relegate me to economical loser status. We really need a shift to the left in politics and a way to redistribute the productivity gains this technology allows.
> I recently had to refresh on some algorithms and some manual coding for an interview where using LLM is forbidden. It was super fun, I forgot how fun solving software puzzles can be!
Solving puzzles is fun when it's negative-free.
On my last interview, I had fan too, but that's only because I had an alternative and didn't even expect to pass. Then the work started, and now puzzles are less fun again, because if I don't keep successfully solving them, my family won't eat.
> AI is just a tool, if your ability to form relationships was easily displaced by a tool, then I'd say it says a lot about the ability rather than the tool.
In abstract, sure, but that is a much shallower discussion that many people are strongly disinterested in. It's generic, where a human decompile may not be (as a cloner I haven't looked into those projects). I don't like the idea of a group of fans of art frames saying don't bother looking at what's in the art frame, our conversation is equal.