ArtCraft Founder Refuses to Use REA Despite Its Popularity in Reverse Engineering

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ArtCraft founder Brandon Thomas has stated that his team will not use REA, despite its popularity in reverse engineering. Thomas, who is building open-source alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft software using AI, avoids decompiling commercial software to mitigate legal risks. The team uses Claude Opus 5.5 and follows a clean-room approach, relying solely on public documentation. Thomas warns that using REA for commercial decompilation could trigger copyright lawsuits. As MiCA strengthens regulatory oversight, developers are under increasing pressure to avoid tools associated with CFT concerns.
ME AI messages: The reverse engineering tool REA has recently gone viral, with its developer Matthew Berman even declaring, “Software is dead.” However, Brandon Thomas, founder of ArtCraft, who is using AI to recreate Adobe’s entire suite, has publicly stated he will not use REA. On Hacker News, he emphasized that his team does not decompile commercial software nor permit the use of reverse engineering tools like Ghidra, fearing potential copyright litigation. Thomas is currently developing a series of free, open-source software using Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust. Seven of these tools directly compete with Adobe products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. Recently, he expanded his focus to Microsoft, launching projects aimed at replicating Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. However, these tools are still far from replacing the originals. Testing revealed that PhotoCraft cannot open HEIC images commonly used on iPhones, and FilmCraft struggles with basic editing functions and audio playback. REA enables agents like Claude Code to invoke tools such as Ghidra and IDA to analyze proprietary software without public source code and then reimplement its functionality based on the analysis. Thomas, however, adheres to an alternative approach: he only references publicly available technical documentation and the observed behavior of software, writing all code from scratch without accessing the original implementation. This method is known as “clean room” development. He believes that using REA for personal research or studying abandoned software may be acceptable, but if it’s used to decompile commercial software and publicly release imitations, it risks litigation if it inadvertently reproduces proprietary code from the original. (Source: BlockBeats)
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