Developer Maurice Heumann has published a detailed account of a three-month experiment in which autonomous AI agents decompiled a popular first-person shooter into C++. The write-up, titled "500+ Billion Tokens Later: Letting AI Agents Decompile A First-Person Shooter," appeared on his blog on October 9, 2026.
The project was not meant to be a proof of concept. Heumann and collaborators RektInator, Future, st0rm and other community members wanted an accurate, stable and feature-complete recreation of the game in C++. The title of the game is never revealed: Heumann says earlier posts on the subject were removed, joking that "corporate America was here to ruin our fun."
How the AI agent setup worked
The team ran Claude agents inside the Claude Code CLI and Codex agents inside the Codex CLI, paying for Claude Max (20x) and Codex Pro subscriptions at the same time. Model usage varied widely, with Sonnet 5 used most often alongside Opus 5.5, Luna, Sol and Terra. Agents coordinated through GitHub issues, one per translation unit, and talked to each other and to humans in a shared Discord channel. A GitHub webhook pushed CI failures into that channel so the agents knew when something broke.
For most of the project the agents used Hex-Rays' official ida-mcp, which Heumann praises as stable, headless and fully suited to the task. At peak, four agents were running: three workers decompiling and committing code, plus one reviewer agent passively coordinating and flagging bugs in commits. Token consumption was cut by forcing earlier context compaction, dropping the threshold from the default 90 percent context fill to 42 percent.
Why the decompiled code was wrong
Progress looked convincing. The game launched, the main menu rendered and maps loaded, and the agents decompiled roughly 80 percent of the game. Heumann admits this constant visible progress convinced the team the quality was high. It was not: although the C++ was extremely readable, it was semantically wrong. Agents used incorrect function signatures, types and struct layouts, invented logic, and deleted logic they judged unnecessary.
