On October 6, a GitHub project called REA had fewer than 10,000 stars. By Monday, it had more than 100,000. More than 30,000 of those arrived on October 11 alone, for a repository that had sat mostly ignored since its creation in April.
REA is short for Reverse Engineer Anything. The name oversells it, and the project’s own documentation says so. But what people are building with it, and with the techniques behind it, is enough to make every software company with a subscription model a little nervous.
What REA does
Apps and games ship as machine code. That’s the raw instruction set a processor reads and humans mostly can’t. Decompiling tries to turn it back into something readable, a bit like tasting a cake and working backward to the recipe.
Reverse engineering is the broader job. It means figuring out how something works without its blueprints, either by watching what an app does and what data it sends, or by reading its code.
REA doesn’t do the hard part itself. It connects AI coding assistants like Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex to the professional tools that do, such as Ghidra, the reverse-engineering suite the NSA released to the public in 2019. The connector is MCP, the Model Context Protocol, a standard Anthropic created so AI models can plug into outside tools. Think universal adapter.
In practice, you point an agent at a program and ask how one feature works. Then you let it dig from what’s on screen down to the binary. It works on desktop apps, Android apps and websites.
The readme is more honest than the hype
Here’s the part the star count hides. REA’s readme states that it “does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application.” It doesn’t even ship its own decompiler.
That modesty also matters legally, at least in a gray-area way. The approach behind these projects is that the developer never reads the original code and ships a similarly coded alternative that does the same thing without being the same thing. Legal(ish) is the fairest description.
And the project isn’t slowing down. REA shipped eight releases between October 3 and October 11.
Spider-Man in Gotham, creepers in Elden Ring
The early output is about what you’d expect when you hand modders a skeleton key. Players have watched Spider-Man swing through the Gotham of Batman: Arkham City. Someone stuffed about 1,600 Minecraft items into FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, so creepers can now fight Malenia.
Another modder pulled Escape from Tarkov’s guns and menus into Skyrim and called it “Escape from Skyrim lol.” Fair enough.
Console exclusives are getting out too. In September, a fan used an open-source AI model and a recompilation toolkit to bring Fable 2, the only mainline Fable game never released on PC, to Windows. The AI got it booting in about an hour. Then came a long stretch of manual fixes, which is the detail the viral clips tend to skip.
The flashiest example came from developer C22 (@c22_dev), who posted on October 9, 2026: “gta v running natively on ios (a recent fun project of mine).” It runs fluidly, which is more than Rockstar Games ever bothered to deliver.
The free Photoshop isn’t ready
Developer Brandon Thomas took the idea to software people pay for every month. Using these techniques, though not REA itself, he used Claude Opus 5.5 to build ArtCraft, a set of free, open-source apps written in Rust that mirror Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom and other Adobe programs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Thomas said he snapped after Adobe charged him its cancellation fee one too many times. Plenty of people share the grudge. In March, Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement with the Justice Department, which accused it of hiding early termination fees and making subscriptions a pain to cancel. The company denied wrongdoing.
Thomas calls ArtCraft a clean-room rebuild. The code is written from scratch using public documentation and observed behavior, never the original code. It’s the same legal approach Compaq used to clone IBM’s PC BIOS in the 1980s.
But temper expectations. The project’s site labels the apps “early alpha” or “in development,” and one pixel artist has already called the Photoshop clone “completely unusable.” Thomas has also walked back his promise to match Adobe’s feature set within a month. He now said it will take months.
Studios are reaching for lawyers
The bigger shift is this: anything that runs on your own device can now be read by an AI agent with enough patience and tokens. That chips away at the oldest copy protection in software, which was simply how miserable it is to read machine code.
The upside is cheaper clones and better game preservation. The downside is easier piracy. And security flaws have fewer places to hide, which cuts both ways.
Publishers have noticed. Activision has already pulled footage of an AI-decompiled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Bethesda sent a cease-and-desist letter over an AI-made browser game called Fallout: New York.
Its creator, Chris First (@chrisfirst), posted on October 4, 2026: “UPDATE: Due to copyrights I had to take down this game. BUT I will have an updated version of the game up and running soon!” He then offered to DM the new link to anyone who replied.
Takedown notices look like the only defense studios have right now, against a trend that may easily force open source everything. If you’re a modder, REA is worth a look today. If you’re an Adobe subscriber hoping to cancel, keep paying for now, because ArtCraft’s own developer just told you it’ll be months.
