After burning 500B tokens, an AI agent decompiles a first-person shooter

500B Tokens Later: Letting AI Agents Decompile a First-Person Shooter

Over three months a team used AI agents to rebuild the C++ source of a first-person shooter, covering 99% of functions, with 83% matching byte-for-byte. Early code ran but was semantically wrong, so the team switched to the original compiler and byte-match checks, refreshing instructions hourly and blocking agents from drifting off task or editing the verification scripts. The author estimates real usage at 600-700 billion tokens, calls the project done, and will keep the code private.

Why it matters: The team turned correctness into a machine-checkable acceptance test, so reviewers are not swayed by excuses written into code comments.