2026-10-12 / Signal #3
Sixteen AI agents spent ~600 billion tokens reconstructing Modern Warfare 2
“It took 16 AIs and hundreds of billions of tokens to remember how *MW2* was built.”
The Story
Developer Maurice Heumann ran a months-long agent crew (Claude/Codex, later ~14 Luna + 2 Opus) against 2009 *Modern Warfare 2*. He estimates 600–700 billion tokens. About 99% of functions exist in reconstructed C++; 83% match the original binary byte-for-byte. Agents shared GitHub tickets and a Discord channel, and sometimes wiped their own VMs. The reconstructed source stays private; this is a documented experiment, not a public leak. Distinct from the already-covered REA “agents can reverse-engineer binaries” product note: this is the cultural artifact of that capability.
Why It Matters
A hobbyist ran a software company of ghosts until a 2009 shooter came back as compilable C++. Game history is now a token budget.
Evidence
Maurice Heumann blog, Oct 9; recaps Oct 11–12
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-10-12