REA tops GitHub as AI takes over reverse engineering
The open-source project REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) plugs disassembly tools such as Ghidra, IDA and Hopper into AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor through MCP, so a user can ask an agent to investigate how an app's feature works and show the evidence. Star History counted 78,800 new stars for REA in the week of Oct 4–10, first among GitHub projects that week, with its total nearing 100,000 when the piece was written; a homepage case traces a DX-Ball sound call to the function that computes left and right channels, reconstructs it in C, passes 3,205 tests and compiles to 63 bytes identical to the original. Elias Bachaalany, co-author of a reverse-engineering textbook, dismissed it with the single word 'hype', and in the same week developer Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft, seven free Rust programs built with Claude Opus 5.5 that target Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and others; PhotoCraft gained 42,900 stars in a week, but users reported broken PSD files containing Smart Objects, crashes when importing many clips, and only 5 of 30 filter-effect tests matching.
Lowering reverse engineering from a specialist skill to something any developer can run through an agent speeds up feature copying while sharpening the legal and ethical questions around it.