Reverse-engineering repo REA gains 208K stars in a week; tested on Signal desktop
aakashgupta · x · 2026-10-20
REA (Reverse Engineer Anything), an MCP server for reverse engineering binaries and apps, has blown past 335K GitHub stars — about 208K in a single week — topping GitHub Trending. It's MIT-licensed and plugs into coding agents like Codex via one npx command.
The author tested it against Signal's open-source desktop app:
- Verifiable answers: REA correctly said you can pin 4 chats, named the file, and flagged what it couldn't verify (the limit can change server-side).
- All 5 questions correct, at 3–7 minutes each.
- Graceful failure: when one run hit an integrity error, Codex finished by reading the app's files directly — the answer still matched the real code.
The takeaway: agents can read your app but not your users. Server-side toggles (Signal can change 80 settings remotely) and real user learning loops remain the moat. His suggestion: pick an app you know (ideally open source), ask the five questions a competitor would, verify each answer against the code, and write down what the agent couldn't tell you — that list is where your moat is.
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