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From GTA V on iPhone to Free Photoshop: This AI Tool Is Upending Software
decrypt.coarticle

From GTA V on iPhone to Free Photoshop: This AI Tool Is Upending Software

Decrypt reports on REA (Reverse Engineer Anything), an open-source toolkit that uses MCP to connect AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex to reverse-engineering tools like Ghidra. It went from under 10,000 to over 100,000 GitHub stars in a week. The article describes AI-decompiled game ports and mashups, and ArtCraft, a set of Rust-built Photoshop-style apps that Brandon Thomas made with Claude Opus 5.5 as a clean-room rebuild. It also covers the copyright and takedown fallout (Activision, Bethesda) and what cheap agent-driven decompilation means for software protection.

TL;DR REA, an MCP bridge from coding agents to Ghidra, went viral for AI-assisted decompilation, game ports and clean-room clones like ArtCraft, raising copyright and protection questions.
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What it claims

REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is an MCP bridge, not a decompiler. It lets an AI coding agent (Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex are named) drive existing reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra. The page says it works on desktop apps, Android apps and websites. The repo was created in April and sat mostly unnoticed. Between October 3 and October 11 it shipped eight releases, and it gained more than 30,000 stars on October 11 alone.

How it works

The intended workflow is question-driven rather than whole-program:

  1. Point the agent at a target program.
  2. Ask how one specific feature works.
  3. The agent traces from observed on-screen behaviour and the data the app sends, down through the code to the binary, calling the attached RE tools over MCP.

REA does not ship its own decompiler. Decompilation quality is whatever the attached tool (e.g. Ghidra) and the agent produce.

How to use it

The page gives no install command, supported tool list beyond Ghidra, licence, or repo URL. Get those from the repository itself. You also need a separate agent subscription or API access; the article notes the approach costs "patience and tokens".

Limits

  • Scope, per REA's own README: it "does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application." The ports and clones in the coverage are not what the tool promises.
  • Not all showcased work used REA:
  • The Fable 2 PC port used an open-source AI model plus a recompilation toolkit. The AI got it booting in about an hour, then it needed "a long stretch of manual fixes."
  • ArtCraft is explicitly not built with REA.
  • ArtCraft maturity:
  • The apps are written in Rust for Mac, Windows and Linux, and are labelled "early alpha" or "in development."
  • One pixel artist called the Photoshop clone "completely unusable."
  • Thomas withdrew his one-month feature-parity promise and now says it will take months.
  • Legal footing is unclear:
  • The article calls REA "legal(ish)" on clean-room grounds. That reasoning describes ArtCraft's method, not an agent reading a binary.
  • Activision pulled footage of an AI-decompiled Modern Warfare 2.
  • Bethesda sent a cease-and-desist over Fallout: New York.
  • Get your own legal review before using REA output in anything you ship.

Organisations named here

  • Anthropic
  • OpenAI
  • NSA
  • GitHub
  • Adobe
  • Justice Department
  • Rockstar Games
  • FromSoftware
  • Activision
  • Bethesda
  • Compaq
  • IBM
  • Brandon Thomas
  • Claude Code
  • Ghidra
  • Model Context Protocol

Technologies named here

  • Claude Opus 5.5
  • REA
  • Ghidra
  • Open-source AI model
  • Claude Code
  • Codex
  • Model Context Protocol
  • ArtCraft
  • Rust
  • GitHub

Techniques named here

  • Decompiling
  • Reverse engineering
  • Clean-room rebuild

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