This Old Repo: LLMs and the Restoration of BattleTris
Oxide and Friends, Tuesday, June 9th, 2026
Oxide and Friends discusses how LLMs helped revive BattleTris, a 1993 networked Tetris game, and the implications for legacy code.
In this Oxide and Friends episode, hosts Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal explore how large language models enabled the revival of BattleTris, a networked competitive Tetris game Bryan built in 1993 that had become incompatible with modern systems due to dependencies like Motif.
Adam used Claude to install updated dependencies, fix compilation errors, and uncover a subtle 64-bit integer width bug that would have required extensive manual debugging. They discuss how LLMs may lower barriers to maintaining forked open-source projects and combat code 'bit rot.' They also weigh challenges including hallucinations, LLM-generated noise, and attribution questions in open-source communities.