It is sad that these communities will be lost. Unfortunately, to a lot of people who just wanted the code and some mods, they now are an artifact of their time. Machine code was meant to be read by machines, not humans. The challenge of turning machine code into code that humans can read was a hard problem requiring months or years of effort that was only an unintentional byproduct of the compilation process, not a challenge deliberately laid out by every compiler for humans to gain a sense of accomplishment each time they emitted an object file. That we are creative enough to derive a sense of satisfaction by creating those challenges for ourselves was a happy coincidence always vulnerable to this kind of disruption.

I am not saying that this way is better, but people might start asking themselves when they have a tool sitting right in front of them that they can use to increase their productivity in this domain on the order of 1,000 times or more, if the value of holding together their community overrides the amount of time and maintenance they will have to devote to maintaining it and the project by rejecting AI. Accomplishing the goal they set out for to begin with, having the source code of the game delivered, can be accomplished by any single person now, and that leaves the technically competent communities fragile to breaking up by any one person splitting off, dumping all the code somewhere, and the less passionate leaving one community for another. How many of those people are there for the community itself, and how many are there to just have the code? It will become clearer with anyone being able to split off and use AI to finish things, but I am confident the most passionate people will still remain on the other side. It's just that the motivations of those involved were not as obvious without the distinction between hobby-as-passion and the primarily goal-driven, until now.