REA, a free project that lets AI agents investigate how software works, passed 100,000 GitHub stars by Monday. It had fewer than 10,000 on October 6. The project, whose name stands for Reverse Engineer Anything, collected more than 30,000 stars on October 11 alone after drawing little attention since its creation in April.
Software usually reaches users as machine code, the instructions a processor runs. Decompiling tries to turn those instructions into readable code. Reverse engineering also includes studying what a program does and what data it sends. With REA, a user can ask an AI agent about a feature and have it investigate behavior on screen, code and the binary. The project supports desktop apps, Android apps and websites.
REA connects assistants including Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex to existing tools such as Ghidra, a reverse engineering suite the NSA released publicly in 2019. It uses the Model Context Protocol, a standard created by Anthropic for connecting AI models to outside tools. REA does not include its own decompiler. Its readme says it “does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application.”
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Projects highlighted alongside REA show the range of work underway. Modders have put Spider-Man in Batman: Arkham City’s Gotham, added about 1,600 Minecraft items to Elden Ring, and brought Escape from Tarkov’s guns and menus into Skyrim under the name “Escape from Skyrim lol.”
In September, a fan used an open-source AI model and a recompilation toolkit to bring Fable 2 to Windows. It is the only mainline Fable game that had never reached PC. AI helped get it booting in about an hour, but extensive manual fixes followed. Another developer showed GTA V running natively and fluidly on iOS.
ArtCraft is rebuilding creative software
Developer Brandon Thomas used related techniques, though not REA, to build ArtCraft with Claude Opus 5.5. The free, open-source Rust project aims to offer apps resembling Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom and other Adobe programs on Mac, Windows and Linux. Thomas calls it a clean-room rebuild based on public documentation and observed behavior, with code written from scratch. Compaq used a similar approach to clone IBM’s PC BIOS in the 1980s.
Thomas said Adobe cancellation fees prompted the project. In March, Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement with the Justice Department, which accused the company of hiding early termination fees and making subscriptions difficult to cancel. Adobe denied wrongdoing. ArtCraft’s site labels its apps “early alpha” or “in development,” and one pixel artist called its Photoshop clone “completely unusable.”
AI could reduce the work involved in examining machine code, opening more possibilities for software alternatives and game preservation while also making piracy easier. Rights holders have already objected to some AI-assisted projects. Activision pulled footage of an AI-decompiled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Bethesda sent a cease-and-desist letter over an AI-made browser game called Fallout: New York.
REA issued eight releases between October 3 and October 11. Thomas has withdrawn his promise to match Adobe’s feature set within a month and now says it will take months.
