Vibe-coded recomps: why the scene is pushing back
For two weeks, the most-shared recomp news on Bluesky hasn't been a new game. It has been about how the games are being made. The MediEvil Recomp beta drew thousands of likes on Bluesky for one reason above any feature: its README says people wrote it, without AI. A week later, the Sonic Adventure recomp drew the opposite reaction, with posts calling it slop because its authors used AI to write it.
What "vibe coded" means
Andrej Karpathy coined "vibe coding" in February 2025 for a style of programming where you describe what you want, let an AI model write the code, and stop reading what it produces. In the recomp scene the term now covers any port where an AI agent wrote most of the code. Some projects use it about themselves. The Beetle Adventure Racing recomp says its continued work is vibe coded with Claude Code, and the Shadow of the Colossus port has the word in its name.
The complaints
- Code nobody understands. A static recompiler's output was always machine-made, but the patches and fixes on top used to be written by people who knew the game. Critics point to AI-written ports whose functions and comments make no sense to experienced decomp contributors. One widely shared comparison set a hand-written function beside a vibe-coded one built from raw Ghidra output. The hand-written one was far easier to follow.
- Built on other people's work. Most recomps borrow names and types from a human decompilation. In September a contributor to the Beetle Adventure Racing decomp wrote that someone had fed the team's repository into Claude and released a recomp before they could. The recomp's README does credit the BeetleDecomp project and explains what it takes from it, but being beaten to a release with their own groundwork stung.
- Ports nobody asked for. Sonic Adventure has had official PC releases: Sonic Adventure DX in 2004 and on Steam in March 2011, with a large modding scene. Several posts asked what an AI-written recomp adds to that.
- Volume. AI tools make new releases cheap, and posters argue the flood buries slower, human-made projects. A Quest 64 fan account also complained about AI-written mods appearing on top of Rainchus's Quest 64 Recompiled.
What the AI-assisted projects say
Most of them are upfront. The Sonic Adventure recomp says AI tools were used as coding assistants and for documentation, and tells anyone who objects not to play it. Of the 32 projects on FanGamesDB that state a position, 20 say they used AI. Some describe a split: the G-Diffuser README puts the AI-written share at 30 percent, all of it reviewed and tested by its author. Disclosure is the reason this debate can happen at all; nobody can argue about a project that hides it.
The ports also run. A recomp that boots, keeps its frame rate and has an issue tracker with answers is useful to someone, however its code was produced. Players still have to decide whether that's enough.
The projects drawing a line
On the other side, more projects now state that they don't use AI, and some won't accept it from contributors. MediEvil Recomp and its sibling SymphonyRecomp say people wrote them, close AI-written issues automatically, and reject pull requests with AI code: "We value human work, PRs made with AI will be closed." GamesRadar+ covered the MediEvil release under a headline cheering that it isn't vibe coded. The teams behind Zelda 64: Recompiled and Banjo: Recompiled say they haven't used generative AI and won't, and TiP-Recomp for Viva Piñata has a strict no-AI rule.
How to check a port yourself
Start with the README. Projects that used AI mostly say so; projects that didn't increasingly say that too. Then look at the same things as for any port: whether it needs your own copy of the game, whether it credits the decomp it builds on, and whether bugs get fixed. Our guide to AI-assisted decomps and recomps has six checks for that.
FanGamesDB lists ports either way, and shows what each project says about AI on its page. The AI disclosure page collects every statement we've found, with a link to the source, and the homepage filters can show only projects that say they were made without AI.
Sources: the READMEs of MediEvil Recomp, SARecomp, the Beetle Adventure Racing recomp and G-Diffuser; GamesRadar+; Martin Fowler on vibe coding; public Bluesky posts from 25 September to 8 October 2026.