200B Tokens Later: A Month of Letting AI Agents Decompile MW2 (momo5502.com)

In an innovative project using Claude Code CLI, a team of AI agents has spent the past month decompiling the 2009 game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) to C++ code. The experiment, which has resulted in nearly 7,000 commits and the successful launch of the game, aims to modernize the codebase while enhancing compatibility across platforms like Linux and macOS. The agents, organized into worker and overseer roles, utilize GitHub for task management and Discord for communication, tackling around 34% of the game's functions so far. However, challenges persist, including over-cautiousness with local testing and difficulty managing larger tasks, highlighting the complexity of long-term AI-driven projects. The significance of this endeavor lies in its exploration of AI coordination and task management in software re-engineering, shedding light on the challenges AI faces in maintaining productivity over extended periods. Key insights include the need for agents to focus on pure decompilation before integrating modernization tasks, and the observation that communication issues arise as the project lengthens. This experiment not only illustrates the potential of AI in software development but also provides valuable lessons on managing AI capabilities in complex, multi-week projects, paving the way for future improvements and refinements in AI-driven programming.