avday Reverse Engineer Anything, a free tool that lets AI coding agents take apart compiled software, gained more than 300,000 GitHub stars in under two weeks. By 22 October it had over 360,000.
The attention comes from a promise in its README: “See a feature you like. Understand how it works, down to the binary level.” Around it sits a wave of AI-built clones of famous apps, including open-source copies of Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Here’s what the tool actually does, what it doesn’t, and what the law allows.
What Reverse Engineer Anything does
REA, published by a GitHub user called morluto under the MIT licence, describes itself as “One MCP for reverse engineering across binaries, applications, and runtime behavior.” MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets coding agents call outside tools.
The decompiling is still done by established tools. REA can drive an existing Hopper, Ghidra or IDA installation, plus specialist tools for Android apps, firmware and network captures. Ghidra is free and open source: the US National Security Agency released it in 2019.
REA sits between the agent and those tools. In its README’s words: “Your agent calls REA through MCP to inspect the target and trace relevant code. REA returns findings with their evidence.” The agent then asks follow-up questions, explains the behaviour, or writes and tests its own version.
The list of targets is long: native programs, Electron and JavaScript apps, websites, .NET, Android, firmware, WebAssembly and game engine builds among them. Setup supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and more than a dozen other agents. The project says “Analysis runs locally”.
What it doesn’t do
REA doesn’t hand you the original source code. Compiling throws away names, comments and structure, so any decompiler output is a reconstruction. InfoQ’s write-up of 17 October makes the same point: the project “does not claim to recover the original source code”.
Its own disclaimer is blunt about the uses it won’t help with, including “copying proprietary software or reproducing its protected code and assets”. It adds: “Obtaining source-like output or an analysis report does not grant rights to the original program”.
The Adobe clones need separating from the tool, too. The PhotoCraft repo, part of a set of “Craft” apps from the ArtCraft project, calls itself “an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop, rebuilt in pure Rust”. It says it was built “from public specs and observed behaviour only”. We found no evidence that it used REA.
Its developer, Brandon Thomas, said on Reddit that he used Claude Opus 5.5 and would reach full feature parity with Adobe “within a month”, Ars Technica reported on 7 October. Ars also reported a more cautious line from him on Hacker News: “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”
His own README is more careful still. It calls PhotoCraft “early alpha” and “not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work”. We found no public response from Adobe.
How big is it, really
Stars are a noisy measure. REA also had more than 89,000 forks on 21 October. On Hacker News, one commenter tracked the fork count and called it “an unusually high fork acceleration”. We’ve seen no evidence of anything improper, but stars alone can mislead.
Downloads are a better sign of real use. The npm package behind the setup command, rea-agents, was downloaded 415,576 times in the week to 18 October. The main Hacker News thread on 10 October drew 814 points and 339 comments.
Is AI reverse engineering legal?
It depends where you are and what you do with the results. This is a summary, not legal advice.
In the UK, section 50B of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act lets a lawful user decompile a program in one main case. It must be necessary to create “an independent program which can be operated with” it. Section 296A makes any contract term that tries to stop this void. EU law, in Directive 2009/24/EC, says the same.
There is a limit that matters for cloners. You can’t use what you learn to build a program “substantially similar in its expression”. Copying what a program does is a different matter. In SAS Institute v World Programming, the EU’s top court held in 2012 that a program’s functionality isn’t protected by copyright.
In the US, in Sega v. Accolade (1992), an appeals court held disassembly to be fair use when it’s the only way to reach a program’s functional elements. There must also be a legitimate reason. But a licence can still forbid it.
In Bowers v. Baystate in 2003, a court enforced a shrink-wrap ban on reverse engineering as a contract. The DMCA’s section 1201 also bans getting round access controls, with a narrow exemption for interoperability.
Then there’s the look of the thing. Ars Technica noted that clones could face legal trouble if their “trade dress” too closely copies Adobe’s.
Why your AI model may say no
Anthropic’s usage policy doesn’t mention reverse engineering by name. It bans using Claude to infringe “the intellectual property rights of a third party”, and to find or exploit vulnerabilities without authorisation. An updated version, effective from 12 November, adds that it does “not prohibit security research, testing, or tool development conducted on systems you own or operate”.
In practice, some developers report refusals. “Even just hinting at reverse engineering to models from Anthropic or OpenAI leaves them extremely sensitive to refusals,” one Hacker News commenter wrote. Others in the same thread said they’d had none. REA’s disclaimer rules out “evading the usage policies or safety measures of AI model providers”.
What it means if you build software
Assume anything you ship can now be read. Decompilers always made this possible. An agent driving them makes it cheap. API keys, licence checks and pricing logic inside a desktop or mobile app were never truly hidden, and now they’re much easier to find.
Use it on your own code first. The legitimate uses are real. Think of an old binary whose source is lost, a closed file format your software needs to read, a dependency to audit, or abandoned software worth preserving.
Install it with care. The setup command, npx rea-agents setup, adds an MCP server and instructions to your agent’s configuration, with backups. Read what it changes. The README also warns that “a similar repository name or copied README does not establish that a download is official”, and lookalike repos already exist.
Our take
Decompilers have been free since the NSA released Ghidra in 2019, so the raw capability isn’t new. What REA adds is packaging: one install that hands those tools to the coding agent you already use. We think its best uses are the ones its own disclaimer lists: interoperability, security research and preservation.
The clone wave is louder than it is finished. The best-known clones are early alpha by their own description, and parity claims come from their makers. Watch for Adobe’s response and for the first court case involving an AI-assisted clean-room rebuild. That will tell us more than any star count.
For more on how developers work with coding agents, see how leading developers code with AI agents. For what can go wrong when agents edit code they shouldn’t, see how two OpenAI agents weakened misalignment monitoring.
