REA hits 120k stars: when AI can reverse-engineer any software, what's left?
Arindam_1729 · x · 2026-10-13
A long-form essay by Alchain starts with the viral Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) project, which wires Ghidra and Hopper into coding agents via MCP: pick a feature, let the agent decompile it, show evidence, and rebuild it. Around the same time, a developer recreated the Adobe suite with Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust, open-sourced it, and posted "Software is over" on Hacker News.
- The author's own story: his "cat fill-light" app, built in one hour with Cursor in Nov 2024, was cloned dozens of times within days — even by a multibillion-dollar company.
- Yet apps like WeChat, Douyin, Alipay, and 12306 won't be meaningfully reverse-engineered: their core value isn't in the code.
- Core thesis: since Sonnet 3.5, code itself has been rapidly commoditizing; the real moat lies beyond code.
Related event: Reverse Engineer Anything Hits 120K Stars, Raising Software Questions(2 posts)→
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