The GitHub project REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) racked up nearly 80,000 stars in just three days, topping today’s GitHub Trending chart.
Article author and source: Xinzhiyuan
Over the past couple of days, a project on GitHub called REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) has racked up nearly 70,000 stars!
For comparison, OpenClaw— which worked a growth miracle at the start of the year and led everyone to start “raising lobsters”—had a GitHub star growth curve like this: by the third day of its explosive growth, it had gained a total of 60,000 stars. On its third day (today), REA is already close to 80,000 stars:
Jev, which went viral a while ago, is closed-source, so we can only compare npm downloads: Jev had 35,000 downloads in its first three days, while REA has already reached around 44,000!
GitHub star trend for Jev’s open-source project
It has already climbed to the top of GitHub Trending today, gaining tens of thousands of stars a day—a surge reminiscent of OpenClaw early this year.
It did just one horrifying thing: let AI strip every commercial software product completely bare.
From now on, point to any commercial app on your screen and say, “I want this feature,” and your Claude Code, Codex, or other agent will use REA to burrow straight into its binary lair, chew through the assembly code, and spit out a perfect open-source implementation—along with a neat list of “evidence from the crime scene.”
The author is even working on reverse-engineering large commercial software like Office!
If it really can fully reverse-engineer the largest closed-source systems, like macOS and iOS, the whole world will be overturned by open source!
The myth of the “closed-source moat,” which has endured for half a century, officially collapsed in this moment;
The so-called trade secrets of software have become a joke that large language models can make public at any moment.
Smash the black box
There are two kinds of things in this world that love to make a mystery of themselves: so-called “gurus,” and tech companies that package their code into binaries and claim they contain “core technology.”
In the past, big tech companies would compile code—possibly as messy as a pigsty—into machine code, and that was enough to call it “intellectual property.”
To ordinary people, these binary files are like a book written in hieroglyphics.
Every so often, a few hackers skilled in reverse engineering would wield ancient artifacts like IDA or Ghidra, digging for scraps in mountains of assembly-code spaghetti. That was considered both an arcane art and a craft.
That’s why big tech companies have been able to sleep soundly, thinking that as long as they don’t give you the source code, you’ll never know whether their black box contains a few monkeys pedaling a generator.
But the arrival of this thing called REA has smashed the black box wide open.
Its logic is so blunt and simple that it’s downright brilliant.
Your large language models are brilliant but can’t lift a finger, right? Ghidra and Hopper can cut through steel, but nobody can understand what they produce, right?
All right, REA acts as a broker based on MCP (Model Context Protocol), bringing the two of them into the same room.
Here’s the situation now: you don’t need to know what ELF or EVM bytecode is. You just need to give orders like a lord:
Go see how Notion’s clipboard bridge is implemented.
Then your AI will call REA on its own, decompile the software, read the assembly, follow the trail to find the interfaces, and finally report back to you in plain English:
At your service, boss. Here’s how it does it: this is the C++ reimplementation, ready to use.
This is basically a “Trisolaran sophon” aimed at the software industry!
In the face of REA, app behavior, native binaries, Android APKs, and even hardware firmware all become one-way transparent glass rooms.
An absurd endgame
If you still think this is just an “assistive tool,” then you probably know nothing about human greed or the inevitability of logic.
Let’s make a few predictions that are very likely to come true:
First, “incremental innovation” at the code level will die completely, and plagiarism will become a precise, automated science.
In the past, you had to copy someone’s work by looking at the UI and guessing how it worked. Now AI can use tools to dig straight into your low-level assembly instructions.
SaaS companies that make a living off one or two proprietary algorithms and a bit of cleverness will wake up tomorrow morning to find their core selling points freely available in some open-source repository.
Second, intellectual property (IP) lawyers are in for a collective heart attack.
When proving that “non-core code is similar” becomes as easy as drinking a glass of water, existing software copyright law will be nothing but a scrap of paper.
You can’t sue an AI, and the code it reproduces can have the same logic but completely different syntax—so different that even a judge wouldn’t know how to rule.
Third, and most absurd of all: software engineering in the future will be an “anti-human contest” to see who can make things more unpleasant.
Since code can’t be hidden, the only way for companies to protect their pitiful assets is to use every means possible to “obfuscate” it.
Take the Python implementation of quicksort as an example. After some simple, elegant code is obfuscated, it ends up looking like this:
Programmers of the future will no longer strive for elegance, readability, or efficiency. Instead, they’ll rack their brains to make their code look like an incomprehensible mess—so messy that even AI would want to kill itself (end the session) after seeing it.
We’re entering an absurd era: AI is working hard to turn shit back into gourmet food, while human engineers are desperately turning gourmet food back into shit.
Oscar Wilde once said that everything in the world is about sex, except sex itself.
To borrow that phrase, after REA’s arrival, every software business in the world will be about compute, data, and network effects—everything except the code itself.
Code is no longer sacred. It’s just raw material that can be reverse-engineered, dissected, and reworked at any time.
REA has ripped away this fig leaf so quickly that many big companies are now standing naked in the wind, still thinking they’re dressed in fine new clothes.