In short
REA is an open-source toolkit that connects AI programming agents to reverse engineering tools like Ghidra. It had fewer than 10,000 GitHub stars on October 6 and surpassed 100,000 by October 12.
Claude Opus 5.5 has sparked a wave of AI-powered game decompilation, mashup, and porting projects—from Spider-Man swinging through Batman: Arkham City to an unofficial PC port of Fable 2.
Developer Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft—a free, Rust-based alternative to Adobe, created by Claude—but he describes it as a "clean-room reconstruction" built from scratch, with no exposure to Adobe’s code.
Do you want to use an AK-47 from Counter-Strike to fight bosses in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? Do you want your NPCs to have truly genius-level minds that deliver unique responses instead of prewritten text? Do you want to run GTA V on your iPhone? What if you could legally use paid software for free? Well, people are now using AI to achieve all of this—and even more.
A free tool that enables AI agents to dissect nearly any software has become the most popular project on GitHub. It had fewer than 10,000 stars on October 6 and has since surged to over 100,000 by Monday.
This tool is called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything. Stars are equivalent to bookmarks on GitHub, and REA garnered over 30,000 stars on October 11 alone, after having been largely overlooked since its creation in April.
How does REA work?
Reverse engineering is a broader concept: figuring out how something works without access to its blueprints, whether by observing an application’s behavior and the data it sends, or by reading its code. This repository does exactly that.
In practical use, users direct the proxy to a specific program, ask how a certain feature is implemented, and then trace it from its on-screen behavior all the way down to the binary level. It works with desktop applications, Android apps, and websites.
REA connects AI programming assistants like Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex to professional tools used for such tasks, such as Ghidra—a reverse engineering suite released by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to the public in 2019. The bridge between them is MCP, or Model Context Protocol, a standard developed by Anthropic that enables AI models to access external tools, essentially serving as a universal adapter.
Developers are much more restrained in their README file, stating that REA "does not claim to recover the original source code or automatically clone applications." It does not even come with a decompiler.
This essentially makes the entire operation legal (or at least nearly legal). The developers never read the code; they simply released an alternative that is similar in encoding but identical in function, yet not exactly the same.
The gate has been opened.
People are doing all sorts of strange things with REA. For example, some players ended up seeing Spider-Man swinging through Gotham City in Batman: Arkham City; others stuffed around 1,600 Minecraft items into a FromSoftware game and made a Creeper fight Marika, the Elden Ring boss. Another modder imported the weapons and menus from Escape from Tarkov into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, calling it “Escape from Skyrim lol.”
Classic console-exclusive games are also leaving consoles: In September, a fan used an open-source AI model and a recompilation toolkit to bring Fable 2—the only mainline entry in the Fable series that never launched on PC—to Windows. The AI successfully got it running in about an hour, followed by a lengthy manual repair process. Another person achieved smooth performance of GTA V on iOS—a feat Rockstar Games themselves never accomplished.
GTA V running natively on iOS (a recent fun project of mine) pic.twitter.com/5k6w06hoLY — C22 (@c22_dev) October 9, 2026
Leveraging these technologies (not these tools), developer Brandon Thomas created ArtCraft: a suite of free, open-source applications written in Rust, offering functionality equivalent to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, and other Adobe programs, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Thomas said he finally snapped after Adobe repeatedly charged him cancellation fees. He is not the only one dissatisfied with Adobe: In March of this year, Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, which accused the company of concealing early termination fees and making subscriptions difficult to cancel, although Adobe denied any wrongdoing.
ArtCraft was not built using REA; Thomas referred to this project as a clean-room reconstruction, meaning the code was written from scratch based on publicly available documentation and observed behavior, rather than the original code—following the same legal approach used by Compaq when cloning the IBM PC BIOS in the 1980s.
These applications are labeled as "early alpha" or "in development" on the project's website, and a pixel artist has called the Photoshop clone "completely unusable."
Today, any software running on your own device can be understood by an AI agent, provided it has sufficient patience and tokens. This undermines the oldest form of software copy protection: the sheer difficulty of reading machine code. This means cheaper clones, better game saves—but also easier piracy and fewer places to hide security vulnerabilities.
Activision has taken down a video of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reverse-engineered by AI, while Bethesda has issued a cease-and-desist letter regarding the AI-generated browser game Fallout: New York.
UPDATE: Due to copyright issues, I had to take down this game. BUT I’ll have an updated version live soon! If you’d like to play it now and give me feedback as I fix things, reply to this comment and I’ll DM you the new link. — CHRIS FIRST (@chrisfirst) October 4, 2026
This appears to be the only defense game studios can muster against this trend, which could easily force everything toward open source.
Meanwhile, REA has continued releasing updates, issuing eight versions between October 3 and October 11. Thomas has retracted his earlier claim that he would match Adobe’s feature set within a month, now stating it will take several months.