Honest thoughts on LLMs in the ROM hacking space?
Posting from a throwaway since I know this can be a controversial topic.
I‘ll start and say that I recently started rom hacking. I’m a software engineer professionally. Recently we all were given/started using Claude Code as part of our workflows. So I decided to give ChatGPTs codex a try and see if it could help with ROM hacking. I have to say, it’s been more helpful than I like to admit. Some of the decompilation projects is not easy to understand especially if you don’t work with C full time.
Its very good at searching the code base rapidly, finding examples, explaining extremely obscure C syntax, and finding and fixing bugs. It’s also great at reducing the tedium of tons of copy and pasting that happens in these projects a lot. I recently was adding a new Pokemon and I really didn’t want to go through the ten files related to graphics and set up the pointers again when that’s just mindless.
I recently found a bug in a very widely used branch that a lot of people pull into their projects. And I honestly was going to try and look into it myself but for fun I asked Codex and it found it and saved me who knows how much time.
im bringing this all up because I know this topic is a little touchy especially when it comes to a field like this where I know people can be hesitant because we want this space to be for creativity and I like many of you probably want creativity to remain a distinctly human thing.
To be clear any creative decisions I have never outsourced to AI. And I of course always test and review any code it generates. But as a solo developer working on this stuff its just been very empowering to make so much progress in such a short amount of time.
What are others thoughts?