AI reverse engineering sweeps GitHub as REA tops trending with 120k stars
Over the past week, GitHub's trending list has been dominated by AI reverse-engineering projects. According to the report, REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) connects professional tools such as Ghidra, Hopper and IDA to coding agents via the MCP protocol, letting users describe what they want to Claude and have it disassemble a program or even rebuild the feature itself; the project reportedly passed 120,000 stars and hit the top of the trending chart in under a week. The article also says former Square engineer Brandon Thomas used Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust to recreate seven Adobe apps, and that his ArtCraft team then rewrote Microsoft Word from public specifications as WordCraft, which reached 6,000+ stars within five days of appearing on GitHub.
By reducing software replication to a single prompt, AI reverse engineering could squeeze single-purpose utility apps while raising the value of genuinely good software and services.