REA tops 110K stars in a week as AI reverse-engineering wave stirs legal debate
REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) connects reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra, IDA and JADX to coding agents like Claude Code and Codex through MCP, so a single prompt makes an agent inspect a binary or app package and return findings with evidence. Citing Star History data, the article says the project went from under 10,000 stars on October 6 to more than 110,000 on October 12 — roughly 100,000 stars in six days. It notes that open-source projects wiring AI into reverse-engineering tools, such as GhidraMCP and IDA Pro MCP, already existed, that several reverse-engineering experts call the hype overblown, and that sending decompiled output to model providers plus anti-decompilation clauses in user agreements can raise trade-secret, copyright and contract risks.
It compresses a specialist reverse-engineering workflow into one install command, lowering the barrier while leaving compliance responsibility almost entirely with the ordinary user who issues the prompt.