REA hits 120K GitHub stars as agents learn to reverse-engineer any app
REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is an MIT-licensed TypeScript project by developer morluto that puts tools such as Ghidra, Hopper and IDA behind an MCP server so coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI can investigate software without source code. 36Kr reported the repository had about 120,000 GitHub stars by Oct 12, with growth surging after a 4.1.0 release on Oct 7 added mobile-app analysis, though other reports put the count at roughly 50,000–80,000. Documented examples include recovering a DX-Ball sound-panning routine as C code that passed 3,205 original x86 test cases, and tracing Notion's clipboard bridge; the community has since pointed it at Adobe and Google apps plus WeChat, Alipay and Douyin, though 36Kr notes those apps' core logic runs server-side behind packing, obfuscation and risk-control defenses.
It turns decades of scattered reverse-engineering tooling into something a coding agent can call directly, making binary analysis routine rather than specialist craft and putting closed-source moats and legal limits in the spotlight.