AI tool REA explodes to 100,000 GitHub stars as game mods and Adobe clones multiply

Github tool REA gains massive following in one week

A free open-source toolkit called REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) went from fewer than 10,000 GitHub stars on October 6 to over 100,000 by Monday, October 12. The project collected more than 30,000 stars in a single day on October 11, after sitting mostly ignored since it was created in April.

REA connects AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex to professional reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra, a suite originally released by the NSA in 2019. It works through MCP, a protocol Anthropic created so AI models can plug into outside tools.

What users are building with REA

• Spider-Man swinging through Batman: Arkham City's Gotham
• Minecraft items merged into Elden Ring
• Escape from Tarkov guns and menus added to Skyrim
• An unofficial PC port of Fable 2, a game never officially released on Windows
• GTA V running natively on iPhone

These projects use the same techniques REA enables, though some were built with different open-source AI models and recompilation toolkits.

Developer builds free Adobe alternatives

Developer Brandon Thomas used Claude Opus 5.5 to create ArtCraft, a set of free open-source apps written in Rust that mirror Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, and other Adobe programs for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Thomas said he was motivated after Adobe charged him a cancellation fee repeatedly. Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement with the Justice Department in March over accusations it hid early termination fees and made subscriptions difficult to cancel, though the company denied wrongdoing.

Thomas emphasized ArtCraft is a clean-room rebuild, meaning the code is written from scratch using public documentation and observed behavior, never the original Adobe code. He compared the legal approach to how Compaq cloned IBM's PC BIOS in the 1980s.

The apps are labeled early alpha or in development, and one pixel artist called the Photoshop clone completely unusable. Thomas has also walked back an earlier promise to match Adobe's feature set within a month, saying it will now take months.

Copyright conflicts already emerging

Activision 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. The developer of that game said he had to take it down due to copyrights but planned to release an updated version.

What this means for software

Anything that runs on your own device can now be read by an AI agent with enough patience, which weakens the oldest form of copy protection: the sheer difficulty of reading machine code. This could lead to cheaper software clones and better game preservation, but also easier piracy and fewer places for security flaws to hide.

REA itself has shipped eight releases between October 3 and October 11. Its developer's readme file states the tool does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application, and it does not ship its own decompiler.

Sources

• Decrypt