From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
REA, an open-source toolkit that connects AI coding agents to reverse-engineering tools like Ghidra, went from under 10,000 GitHub stars on October 6 to more than 100,000 by October 12.
Claude Opus 5.5 has fueled a wave of AI-decompiled game mashups and ports, from Spider-Man swinging through Arkham City to an unofficial PC port of Fable 2.
Developer Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft, free Rust-built Adobe alternatives made with Claude, but calls it a clean-room rebuild that never touches Adobe's code.
Would you like to kill a boss in Skyrim using an AK47 from Counter Strike? Give your NPCs a real genius-level brain that gives you unique answers instead of predefined strings of text? Would you like to run GTA V on your iPhone? What about using paid software for free, and legally? Well, people are doing that and more with AI right now.
A free tool that lets AI agents pull apart almost any piece of software has become the hottest project on GitHub, jumping from fewer than 10,000 stars on October 6 to more than 100,000 by Monday.
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It’s called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything. Stars are GitHub’s version of a bookmark, and REA collected more than 30,000 of them on October 11 alone, after sitting mostly ignored since its creation in April.
How REA works
Apps and games ship as machine code, the raw instructions a processor reads and humans basically can’t. Decompiling tries to turn that back into readable code, a bit like tasting a cake and working backward to the recipe.
Reverse engineering is the bigger umbrella: figuring out how something works without its blueprints, whether by watching what an app does and the data it sends, or by reading its code. This repository does exactly that.
In practice, a user points an agent at a program, asks how one feature works, and lets it dig from what happens on screen all the way down to the binary. It works on desktop apps, Android apps, and websites.
REA hooks AI coding assistants such as Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex up to the professional tools that do that job, like Ghidra, the reverse-engineering suite the NSA released to the public in 2019. The bridge is MCP, the Model Context Protocol, a standard Anthropic created so AI models can plug into outside tools—basically a universal adapter.
BitcoinBTC · USD$82,869−3.4%Oct 5Oct 7Oct 9Oct 11Oct 12$86.6k$84.6k$82.7k$80.7k24h HighHigh$84,23124h LowLow$82,281VolVol$999.0MMarket projectionsOdds by MyriadToday$82,000 to $84,000$82k–$84k69% chanceThis weekAbove $82,000Above $82k61% chance→Buy Bitcoin with USDTPowered by JupiterPrice data by CoinGeckoCoinGeckoMore Bitcoin news and projections →The developer’s “readme” file itself is far more modest than the hype, stating that REA “does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application.” It doesn’t even ship its own decompiler.