What just happened? Vibe coding and AI agents have made decompiling and recompiling games a breeze, but things could soon change significantly. Claude Code is now instructed to avoid this type of workload, meaning decompilation enthusiasts will have to go elsewhere to get the job done.
Claude may soon no longer be one of the best AI tools for decompiling and recompiling existing games. According to Anthropic programmer Addy Osmani, the model behind the company’s Vibe coding service will now avoid user prompts demanding replicas of other people’s video games.
The change was first spotted by decompilation enthusiasts over the weekend. On October 27th, Claude Code began to address a new rule hidden behind the “tengu_heron_brook” flag. The rule is intended to force the AI model to create original games based on users’ own designs and assets, rather than content sourced from games already on the market.
Shortly after the rule was discovered, Osmani confirmed that Anthropic added two new sets to Claude Code’s Opus 5.5 model. Restoring someone else’s intellectual property apparently violates Claude’s usage guidelines, meaning users should only be allowed to Vibe code “original” games. Osmani also said the company would continue to work on the new rules to achieve the “right balance.”
— Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) October 30, 2026
AI-powered recompilation and decompilation projects have taken the IT world by storm. Vibe programmers are now leveraging previous human-conducted research efforts to “port” console-exclusive games to the PC – or vice versa. Projects like AnyPS5 are even trying to convert PlayStation 5 games into “native” PC titles.
The Vibe-encoded decompilation flood is also having a significant impact on human-led research efforts. The website decomp.dev has since been shut down because AI-powered coding has undermined meaningful efforts to understand and document how game code works. Vibe programmers are now forking existing decompilation projects and letting the AI do the work, or racing to port games to other platforms just to put their name on the map.
Vibe-encoded game recreations might now be more difficult with Claude, but the decompilation “fun” will likely continue regardless. Users simply need to switch to other AI models and services, adapt to the rapidly improving open-weight models, or resort to offline setups to continue performing new recompiles and web-based conversions.
