I'd say it very much depends on software focused the company/industry in question is.
On the lower end, there are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to build websites for other small/medium sized businesses that don't care enough about tech to pay for a full-time engineering team.
For those companies and developers, I suspect the increasing rise of AI will be a bloodbath. If your whole value proposition is "we can build your website using WordPress/Squarespace/Shopify/[CMS name here]", then AI can basically do about 95% of your job. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to shutter when clients take the work in-house due to AI, and many others will probably lose about 90% of their employees due to AI solutions being generally 'good enough'.
On the other hand, if your company is tech focused and needs to implement more complex functionality as a selling point, then there'll still be a place for software engineers even with AI. This is where the engineer as pseudo project manager thing comes into play, and where the actual coding side of things is probably going to be limited to things the AI can't implement properly.
Both situations will probably see a significant drop in the number of software engineers employed there, but the latter feels like it'll still have some room for a career.
If you're asking why people tend not to like folks using AI without saying so, it's because it feels dishonest when someone implies they drew/built/made something themself but had a computer do it for them. And a lot of people don't think using AI for something is real work, and question why they should care about something that its original creator didn't put much work into.
Of course, this does create a sort of catch 22 situation. If you lie about using AI and get caught, people will hate your work because you lied about it. If you admit to using AI, they'll hate your work because you used AI.
This is why you don't rely on AI too much. An LLM may be able to decide what you can do if you run it via OpenAI or Anthropic's servers, but a text editor and your programming language of choice just does what it's asked to.
Alternatively, open source community software run by folks in a country that doesn't have any age verification laws/don't care less about them.
Yeah, this makes sense. Interviews don't test for competence, they test for similarities to the person hosting the interview, and confidence under pressure. Which aren't really signs of a great candidate, just an extrovert with a promising career as an online influencer.
If you're neurodivergent, well good luck I guess. The interview process seems to have been designed by the same folks that think someone being likeable at the pub means they're a good politician.
The solution at the end is definitely useful, though I feel like more companies need to be more realistic about their expectations for a software engineer. A staff engineer at Google isn't going to go from making a couple of million dollars a year to making near minimum wage at your small podunk agency in the middle of nowhere. Gotta stop testing people like you're Google or Meta when the company doesn't need anyone near that calibur.
Yeah I've noticed that too. Hopefully it's just a technical blip, though I do always worry that some sort of legal pressure or creator burnout has hit the site when stuff like this happens.
Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
Advances in tech, especially for web development/front-end development. I still remember the old days when tables were used for designing sites, form fields were almost impossible to customise, cross-browser compatibility was hell, etc.
The fact we don't need to worry about those things anymore is amazing. The fact we can easily design and build an accessible website with a three column layout that resizes nicely when viewed on a mobile or table device is kinda incredible.
Similarly, the possibilities that video games now allow with more advanced tech. Yes, there were amazing games in the old days. But so many games I've enjoyed recently (Donkey Kong Bananza, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, etc) simply wouldn't have worked in the 80s/90s/early 00s.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but I recall recently asking Claude to write something for me and telling it not to use em dashes, and the resulting text did indeed come back without any em dashes in it. So, perhaps it's not quite as good of an indicator as it once was.
Always nice to see another game decompiled like this. It's a big deal as far as laying the groundwork for possible ports to PC and other consoles is concerned, and will probably aid modders quite a bit.
If anyone needs a full list of these projects (which includes this one), there's a pretty good selection here:
I'm the author of ghidra-delinker-extension and these are not full lists of these projects. Here are some public projects that I'm aware of which aren't listed:
I've also been in discussion with people working on decompilation projects which are private. I won't share details, but it includes both well-known games and recent games (as in, built with link time optimizations).
The decompilation community is quite decentralized, with lots of Discord servers specific to one platform or a series of games. In the case of Windows it's also heavily fragmented, as there is no equivalent to community-standard tooling like splat or dtk-decomp for that platform, although my Ghidra extension has carved itself a niche in it.
I'd rather not post invite links here directly out of concern for spamming, but I can leave some easy-to-follow breadcrumbs.
The decomp.me Discord server invite link can be readily found on that website and in the README of its GitHub repository. It's the closest thing to a central hub of the decompilation community. You can find some invite links in its chat history by searching for "discord.gg" (including the servers listed below).
Some of these Discord servers have a #other-servers or #related-servers channel with tons of invite links to other similar Discord servers. In particular, these servers have those channels:
- PS1/PS2 Decompilation
- GC/Wii Decompilation
That way, you should be able to find dozens and dozens of Discord servers on that topic. There are still many more out there (I've joined at least six others that aren't directly reachable from the invite links inside the servers I've mentioned).
There are also other Discord servers about reverse-engineering that can contain discussions about decompilation techniques or projects.
I mostly don't use Discord, but I'm intrigued how this system works. If the invite link is already posted on the project website and the readme of a Github repository, why would putting it in a Hacker News comment risk spammers?
First, because personally I think it's bad etiquette to post an invite link publicly on large, open-access forums like Hacker News.
Second, because while the biggest decompilation Discord servers have effective moderation team and processes, the vast majority are just a server for a project from one or a couple of persons with <100 members joined. Such small servers don't have round-the-clock moderation or customized settings.
Third, because I regularly see phishing crypto spam posted in the smaller servers. Spreading invite links publicly carelessly increases the odds that these scammers find them and spam them.
The part I don't understand is how posting the link on HN is different from posting it on Github. I'm wondering for example if Github has some sort of extra bot protection HN does not, or if there's some cultural difference I'm not aware of or seeing.
Discord servers are more like a hangout place than a public forum and public invite links are like putting a key under a mat. Just because the owners of a Discord server put it on their public webpage or GitHub repository doesn't mean it's cool to spread it around willy-nilly.
There are also practical concerns. An invite link that needs to be deleted (for example due to spam abuse) means that it will no longer work. Updating all the places where that old link appeared to the new one can be impractical or impossible.
HN isn't a good place to share Discord invite links. I'd recommend putting an email address (or something) in your bio – ideally one you don't mind getting spammed – so people can send such things to you semi-privately.
I've been experimenting with AI in this space myself. Don't believe any of my projects are listed there but I posted an article some days back where I showcased static recompilers all playing at least one commercial game for the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy and Playstation. I actually just announced a playable build of Megaman X today that eliminates all its slowdowns.
Whether the broader communities will accept any of my work remains to be seek given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
given the heavy correlation to those communities and anti AI sentiment.
I've noticed the anti-AI sentiment is starting to die down. People are slowly realising that, along with the voluminous amounts of slop, there are others who have been able to leverage AI with much success.
You say that, but just today I showcased my Megaman X Recomp on a Megaman subreddit. I got harassed by a drive-by anti-AI cabal and then the moderators of the subreddit removed my submission after I reported the harassment, citing that AI was involved, and AI is theft.
One bizarre related thing I've noticed is often you will find people who otherwise seem ok with people violating the copyright and other various licenses by "decompiling" a game, but as soon as AI is involved suddenly it's a big controversial ethical issue... as if totally violating the authors rights is a minor inconvenience.
I've been off-and-on again. I stopped using it for years. I begrudgingly began using it again as I founded a private game server (before AI was viable, even, so it wasn't sued) for a game that shutdown a few years ago.
Perhaps hilariously, the moderators there also didn't like me and told me to eat shit when I suggested people start doing packet captures. At least they warmed up to me over the years though and actually endorse the project now.
Doesn't make the rest of the website any less of a cesspool though.
Libraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically.
The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle.
If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.
Because libraries predate copyright and publishers and all the industry behind it. If libraries were to be invented nowadays, they won't let them purchase a single physical book to be enjoyed by several different physical persons over the course of time. What the publishing industry would like to have is 1 physical person = 1 or more physical copies, not the other way round.
So how do you explain LLM companies paying roughly none of it? If you're saying the protection is stronger now... how have they not been sued out of existence?
Honestly at this point a library might be an easy sell, in some ways. Copyright holders would be getting something rather than nothing (or the nearly-nothing they get from streaming), they might leap at that.
This can't be overstated! Libraries would never be allowed to come into existence today. I think we should all think long and hard about the society we have collectively created. It is not too late to make an effort to fight to reclaim the rights and norms we've ceded...
Yeah, I may give a whirl to those subreddits, but it does really show the dissonance between a sect's visceral hatred of AI relative to their interests when they're rejecting the progress of a game on the game's own franchise's subreddit.
That's a pretty valid viewpoint, honestly. Unless the AI is open weights and free of charge it's using human effort that nobody paid for to do a commercial thing.
I would make the argument that open weights models are ethically still maybe questionable, but at least it's making the output a public good
The counterpoint is that every company ever has based themselves on human effort they never paid for (usually). The entire scientific endeavour for example. Standing on the shoulders of giants and so on.
Depends on the community. From my experience, the modding scenes for certain more recent games seem abivalent about it, or more willing to tolerate it, while the communities for modding older games tend to be more heavily against it.
For example, when a Paper Mario decomp/port used AI, the subreddit for the series pretty much tore it to shreds for that. Mario fan communities in general tend to be really heavily against it, with Mario Fan Games Galaxy, SMW Central, and SMBX having rules which are basically "no AI allowed for submissions ever".
Meanwhile my experience on sites like ROM Hacking.net is that AI is more accepted/tolerated there.
So, it's very much a series by series thing. Best to check what the Mega Man community thinks of LLMs before you post it.
When people work for an insanely difficult project for more than 2 years, they probably pick something they personally love and don't need any external request.
As someone who reverse engineers games for fun and preservation, I would personally be more than happy to take an external request. With compensation, of course. Maybe not so much if it's the "do hundreds to thousands of hours of highly specialised labour for free" kind of request :)
I transcribed several pieces from a public-domain orchestral score of Swan Lake and uploaded them to Musescore's web site. This would have been ~dozens of hours of work. (For me, starting with almost no relevant training.)
I did this because those particular pieces were significant to me.
But I attracted the attention of another user who wanted to see more public-domain orchestral music on the site, and who contacted me to ask if I was planning to do the entire ballet (no; it's about 600 pages) and if I would take requests.
I responded that I was happy to take requests but wouldn't guarantee that I'd do any work on them. He requested Tchaikovsky's Italian Capriccio, which was a decent guess as to what I might be willing to transcribe (it's the same author)... but I looked into it, listened to the music, and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to keep working on it.
So yeah, a request might work, but it's only likely to work if you happen to make an excellent guess about what the person would have wanted to do anyway. Think of it like drawing someone's attention to something.
What is the current SOTA in terms of tools? How are these tools being used with LLMs to speed up decompilation?
My current wishlist is to decomp Elite CGA version (tiny x86 binary) back into assembler and annotating all the method names, vars etc. That way I could swap out some of the inner loop using knowledge that has been uncovered in the last 40 years of optimizations.
These models are getting crazy good at examining things like core dumps and disassembly. I've been using an agent to write compiler logic, and its amazing the kind results you can get by having the agent examine the raw binary outputs. I would not be surprised to see agents excel at identifying and labeling patterns for decompilation.
Really? Could you share your techniques that get you there?
Inspired by https://github.com/scosman/cursed_browser, I have a little art project going where the CPU of a virtual machine is entirely LLM-powered. But even though the ISA is well known and clearly in the LLM's training data (it answers question about it mostly fine), I can rarely get it to even decode a handful of instructions in a row correctly. It'll e.g. do 10 instructions right (even execute right!), then just lose the ability to do bit manipulation all of a sudden and fail miserably at even decoding the 11th. If I try to help it along it'll apologize profusely, do it wrong in five novel ways, before it gaslights me saying I'm in fact mistaken.
On the lower end, there are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to build websites for other small/medium sized businesses that don't care enough about tech to pay for a full-time engineering team.
For those companies and developers, I suspect the increasing rise of AI will be a bloodbath. If your whole value proposition is "we can build your website using WordPress/Squarespace/Shopify/[CMS name here]", then AI can basically do about 95% of your job. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to shutter when clients take the work in-house due to AI, and many others will probably lose about 90% of their employees due to AI solutions being generally 'good enough'.
On the other hand, if your company is tech focused and needs to implement more complex functionality as a selling point, then there'll still be a place for software engineers even with AI. This is where the engineer as pseudo project manager thing comes into play, and where the actual coding side of things is probably going to be limited to things the AI can't implement properly.
Both situations will probably see a significant drop in the number of software engineers employed there, but the latter feels like it'll still have some room for a career.
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