REA hits 120k stars: AI reverse-engineers any software — so what's left to defend?
AlchainHust · x · 2026-10-13
The author discusses the viral REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) project — wiring Ghidra and Hopper into coding agents via MCP so an agent can dissect any software's features and rebuild them, now at 120k GitHub stars. Around the same time, another developer used Claude Opus 5.5 with Rust to clone the Adobe suite, open-source and free, after being burned by Adobe's cancellation fees, leaving "Software is over" on Hacker News; the community followed with reverse-engineered AC controls as a Mac menubar app, AirDrop ported to Linux, and more.
The author argues software's code layer has been dying since sonnet 3.5 in 2024 — top coding agents can already clone a working prototype without REA. Yet apps like WeChat, Alipay and Taobao can't be meaningfully reverse-engineered because their core value isn't the code. The author then recounts how their one-hour Cursor-built cat flashlight app got cloned by dozens of copycats and even a "tribute" from a $10B company within days, using the story to explore what remains defensible in the AI era.
Related event: Reverse Engineer Anything Hits 120K Stars, Raising Software Questions(2 posts)→
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