AI Aversion

A few days ago I saw a post on Reddit where someone had released a tool for taking Halo Infinite replays and turning them into a 2D represented viewer with playback.

This wasn't the first time one of these products had come up, because a few months prior to that OpenSpartan released their own iteration of this tool. From someone who had peeked at the Halo Infinite recordings binary files I was quite impressed with both the tools. Since mapping out the internal structure of these video files was time consuming and challenging and not something I could figure out on my own.

6 months ago OpenSpartan had a invite-only demo with no published source code so I kinda ignored it. My interest isn't really in the product, but the development aspect of it. So this time when LevelUp was an open source repository for anyone to use, I was curious about the internal shape of these replays. Pretty quickly though when I was met with hundreds of markdown files in French, I knew my human time to quickly view a schematic was over.

I asked my Claude agent to review it in English and see if anything resembled a whitepaper and it found this External Dev Markdown file that had some good research. It confirmed what I thought that most of this data is not stateless and grows upon assumptions of previous frames and/or internal game engine assumptions. So I wanted to peek at the commits to see the progression of this effort and instead was left with an enormous PR.

commit c8eeea23a2c627373136fec48bb65d69df48dbb8 (tag: v8.0.0)
Author: Guillaume <g.sit@removed>
Date:   Tue Oct 20 09:48:22 2026 +0200

 feat: LevelUp v8.0.0 — rejeu 2D, Tactique, Emprise, citations du film, débrief, mise en commun des jetons (#96)
  Release v8.0.0. Détail : docs/CHANGELOG.md, docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md, .ai/PLAN_RELEASE_V8_2026-10-17.md.
  
  Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

11,342 files changed, 2,612,887 insertions(+), 150,266 deletions(-)

So it was a fun skim reading in the morning, but I was done digging in further. It appeared this success was powered via an immense amount of AI, reverse engineering and more. I don't discount it, but for a human who wanted to see how something worked to understand it myself. I'm not glancing at ~2.5 million lines of code in the morning in a human language I don't know. I was missing the days of a few hundred lines of pure text from a human from the days of Iron Forge and his Halo 2 whitepaper.

The comment section though was insane to me. There were comments of "ai slop" and "why didn't you disclose AI" like people had a moral stance to not use a really cool piece of software because AI was involved. Enterprise software I'd venture a guess worldwide has AI involved now, because you can't afford to not have it.

Moving on from that though, video game modification or research is hitting a very interesting different point in time. We might have looked at the last 20 years as handcrafted discoveries, amazing research and tools were built out. These creations really stood as a portfolio item for the individual or community. We can look back at the last few years for another new exploit on the original Xbox (Strcpy) or the Xbox 360 Bad Update or FATXplorer XL patches or a rewritten Halo 2 Map Viewer and think "boy that was some effort and research".

Now we have projects like Project Reclaimer (Halo 3 on PC) that are moving at speeds that doesn't seem possible without the support of AI. The dream any kid Halo modder wanted to do was here. 128 players on Halo 3, 16 in campaign, lobby voting and more. Every week it seems more things are changed. It seems as a game ages out the community could step in with the power of community based token spending (AI).

Xbox is not messing around with this era and created Xbox Labs - a new division of their company.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.

Introducing XBOX LABS

This message was just sent to Team XBOX employees globally. Team, The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been

XBOX WireMike Nelson, XBOX Wire Editor

From the community side I'm sure the legality of mixing two different video games together with AI and producing a creation makes every lawyer twitch, but so far with all these mods requiring the official games installed the studios are still winning with purchases of old games. We have a rise of new creators enabled by technology and its such a interesting/different time to be in.

What isn't fun or interesting is how many new vulnerabilities are being discovered left and right.

We can see at CVE metrics that so far in 2026 we've accelerated the amount of published records by a lot. Quarter 1 only had 3k more than 2025, but when you consider how much larger recent years are from 2022 you can tell something has changed. I'm sure once the 3rd quarter is published we will see an even larger number than we expect.

Clearly the answer is AI - it can find flaws in codebases in seconds and produce reports, proof of concepts and more. Though as someone who maintains a few popular open source projects it isn't as fun or interesting as one would have hoped. At least from the projects I maintain I'm getting CVE requests for things that I call "synthetic findings" clearly packaged together with AI.

These are discoveries that stem from an insane amount of prerequisites and assumptions that might not represent anything concrete or be largely irrelevant from regular usage. In the case of Apktool that normally all start with "assuming filesystem access prior to an apktool build command". I think you can obviously see the oddity there. If you have filesystem access you probably can do more damage than abusing a flaw with a tool to do something nefarious.

However, find a flaw in apktool that can be triggered during disassembly and now we are talking about something dangerous. This is what I wish the rest of the world understood for every piece of software since I'm getting a bit of exhaustion from the amount of CVEs I'm having to patch on software that I deem are largely irrelevant. Especially when the flaw is something as stupid as a ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service) on a development package that builds frontend assets.

All of this to say - I use AI daily so I'm far from avoiding it, but I sure wish a bit of open source development & vulnerability reporting went back to humans talking to humans.