# I Tested The Viral Github Repo That Reverse Engineers Anything

Channel: Nick Saraev
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAzs_rU6080
Duration: 11 min
Language: English
Words: 2411
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/dAzs_rU6080

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[0:00] Reverse engineer everything, where REA is an MCP that allows you to virtually rebuild any software you want by actually decompiling the source app and then giving your AI agent a bunch of instructions behind how to recreate or replicate those features. Pretty much everybody is talking about it and doing cool demos like reverse engineering their Apple TV remote in around 45 minutes. Or like one person on X thinks reproduce the entire suite of Photoshop apps. In this video, I'm going to run you guys through how REA works, but also why I think a couple of people are are missing the point. And ultimately speaking, what this means for software

[0:37] more broadly. So yeah, everybody on planet Earth is making a big fuss right now about REA. Matthew Berman said reverse engineer anything software is done. You know, this fellow here said software is dead, long live software. Amjad, the Replit CEO, said this is insane. Pretty much all software will soon be open source. And Jaden Williams says God help us all. You know, somebody that used to develop software, I can empathize with a lot of these concerns. But there are a couple of things that I think you need to know about REA to really be able to deduce whether or not that is A true and B what you can do about it. So first,

[1:08] the way reverse engineer anything actually works is you, a lowly human, will ask your super smart squiggly AI agent, "Hey, how does this feature work? Can you make me this app? And reverse engineer it." Your AI agent then sends a request to the REA MCP. This then sends a request to a tool suite containing apps like Ghidra, which I think was initially released in 2019, Hopper, which I believe is 2011, and even IDA, which I pretty sure was released in the 90s. This REA library then allows your agent to seamlessly communicate with each of these tools. It can then use Chrome DevTools and other you know, services to help poke around

[1:47] the app and learn more about it before finally giving you some sort of result. That result usually includes some pseudo code, which just means not actually code, just high-level descriptions of what's going on, some proof of what's happening, and then any unknowns. Your agent then picks that up, and then it just continues circling around and around like a fat merry-go-round until your agent has effectively rebuilt the whole app. It's pretty easy to get up and running with this stuff. You literally just tell your agent, "Hey, go download reverse engineer anything, REA, and let me know when you're done." Um I'm using this inside of a cool terminal

[2:20] manager called Orca. Reason I like Orca is because I just get to, you know, really quickly and easily create a bunch of terminal subdivisions, and then I can run Claude in one, Codex in another, and so on and so forth. You don't need to do that, obviously. You can do this in whatever freaking app you guys want. Um I just, you know, I like this one because it makes me feel all smart and big-brained. As you guys could see, the main agent here has already found REA, and now we can go and we can try rebuilding something. All right, now that it's all downloaded and installed,

[2:47] thanks, Claude. We can actually just start a new Claude session. So, I'm going to exit out of this. So, I'm going to go Claude again. We were indeed busting. And I'm going to say, "Use REA to rebuild the preview app on my Mac." So, for those of you guys that don't know, preview is just like a little photo app. It looks just like this. And in my case, I have this loaded up with a pretty badass-looking picture of some scary titan-looking thing attacking some tiny human-looking thing. And you know, there's a bunch of different functionality. I have a little I button that I can click. I have a little zoom

[3:18] out, zoom in. You know, this is a this is an application, essentially. And so, I can, you know, rebuild my own, obviously. But what if I really like the way that this was laid out, the way that it looked? What if I wanted the ability to, I don't know, draw boxes or maybe do a little bit of handwriting on it? Well, that's where

[3:34] something like REA would come in handy. And so, I just said, "Rebuild the preview app on my Mac." And now I'm just going to sit around and wait. And let's see what happens. One tiny tweak. While this is happening, I'm going to get Claude to try and rebuild the same app without using REA. So, I'm going to say, "Without using REA, a of the Mac preview app, the photo viewer one, and then serve me the result. You can do this in I don't know, however you see fit. Let's see which one here I like more. It's done some decompiling with Ghidra and I'd say we're probably

[4:07] halfway done. And it looks like these two are actually in a race to the finish trying to create the preview app in their own independent ways. Okay, and so the end result uh was first completed by Opus without any libraries. As you guys could see here, we have the the preview app. Does seem a little bit laggy. I think that may be because I'm currently developing the other app in the background, but hey, uh we'll compare them more broadly in a moment. So, it's been another, you know, 3 4 minutes since uh still waiting for the one on the left, okay, the R E A version to

[4:37] work. It's testing by opening and closing a bunch of tabs, flashing alpha on my screen. Um I think it's actually going to launch now with three files and show me the difference. Cool. And so, here is the app that R E A developed. Okay, and here is my preview app on my computer. And as you guys could see here, it is virtually the same thing. Uh if I just were to pull this open to approximately the same size as my other

[4:59] computer as my other window, let's see. We have what looks to be the title. This one is far longer, which I think explains a big chunk of the difference. We do have the information. We can zoom in, zoom out. We can share this. Uh looks like we can also draw on the page. And the drawing is occurring far faster

[5:18] than the other app. Uh looks like we can also rotate as much as we want, stop the annotation, and then ultimately save this file to my computer, which is neat. The issue is everybody's treating this like it's a super new thing. Um but I think like a lot of technological developments, to be clear, it is not. I mean, Ghidra over here has been around since, as mentioned, 2019. It was actually released by the freaking National Security Agency. I don't know if you guys could tell, but that is an American-ass looking eagle. The Hopper Disassembler, I don't know if it's clear, was also not made anytime recently. That website looks like it

[5:48] crawled out of the Stone Ages. Finally, IDA, although a little more modern, was also released a forever ago. And so, the point I'm trying to make here is nothing is super new or special. All REA does is it just basically gives your AI agent access to these tools in a really simple interface, and that is ultimately what allows it to do this reverse engineering. But, I want to make things really clear here. Um I've seen a lot of people talk about how dope this thing is and how incredible uh this enables scientific and software advances to to be. But, I haven't actually seen very good demos. And so, I think this is one

[6:19] of those situations where the internet has probably gotten a little bit ahead of itself. Uh you know, there's a lot of incentives on signal boosting cool developments like this. Obviously, a lot of people have also been doing very dope things with games like, you know, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in Halo 3 meets Modern Warfare times Runescape. Um you know, I myself I had a reverse engineer moment a couple days ago where I combined themes from Minecraft and then Attack on Titan and made a really dope game. And you know, I think it's more of like a memetic cultural moment than it is,

[6:45] genuinely speaking, a new breakthrough. And part of the reason that I think you know this is because virtually every video that talks about REA starts with a graph that looks something like this, which is just how many GitHub stars it's gotten over the course of the last few days. You can see that it was, you know, probably reasonably steady about a week ago, week and a half ago. But, last few days in particular have been pretty

[7:05] nuts. Um you know that when a video starts talking about how many GitHub stars a thing has or how super trending it is, that it probably lacks something more interesting to show you instead. Like, if the only thing you could talk about are GitHub stars, then it's like, well, why don't you just show me the super dope demo instead, right? Like, why are we talking about people's perception to a thing as opposed to the actual value of the thing itself? Anyway, that's just me being an old man. Uh more broadly, you know, there are some really cool reverse engineering applications. And I think as somebody that's been doing a

[7:35] fair amount of this stuff myself over the course of the last little while, I should talk uh in generalities about what this means for software. Most software is going to become open source, and that's because what we've done is we moved up an abstraction layer from specific software applications and how they're done to a general intelligence, aka, you know, your Claudes, your Codecses, um that can just rebuild software on the fly. To that end, most of the front ends and back ends are also going to be highly commoditized if not already. I mean, we're seeing a bunch of really cool things happen, this Cambrian explosion of opportunity and

[8:07] availability, but you know, I always like to think about things from a business perspective as, you know, a business owner and somebody that's made a fair amount of money with this stuff. What new opportunities does this really open versus what doors does this close? And this closes a lot of doors. Not reverse engineer anything to be clear, but just the trend of this technology more broadly over the course of the last few years up until now. Um virtually all of the wrapper apps that wrap around Claude and Codecs and deliver some sort of additional functionality, like sweet visuals, and hell, even my sexy explainer app that you guys could see

[8:37] right over here. All this stuff is just swallowed up by the models themselves through design updates, you know, interactive explainer updates. Um the cool software games and stuff like that that you guys are developing, you know, the the actual value ladder has moved. And so, while I think you could probably get some short-term benefits out of reverse engineering your favorite app and trying to sell it on a black hat world or whatever, obviously you'd face severe intellectual property restrictions, and so it's less we can make a dope business out of this and more the barrier for recombining pre-existing ideas and turning into

[9:06] something kind of cool has gone down. And the barrier to like hitting trending on X with a cool demo like this has also gone down. To be clear, you don't need reverse engineer anything to reverse engineer an app. You could actually just tell your agent, "Hey, I really like XYZ feature in XYZ app. Could you go and figure out how it works and then reverse

[9:23] engineer it for me?" And you know what? It'll use its own little screenshot tool, take screenshots of like an animation as it goes across the page or whatever the hell it is that you wanted to copy. It'll do it for you. You don't need a cool library or whatever. It'll already know how to do that just through, you know, virtue of its own reasoning process alone. Uh will it do so perfectly? Will it copy the exact functions of the app? Probably not. But, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those functions that it is attempting to replicate actually end up being more efficient when written by AI than by

[9:49] humans alone. We saw this with the recent Photoshop suite uh uh repurposing, and it's going to be pretty cool. You know, we can get pretty close with just vanilla uh Claude code. And I want you guys to know that that's now. I mean, in like a month or or two, realistically, Claude code is going to have a lot of these reverse engineer features not built directly in, but the post-training that is continually occurring on it will guide it towards being able to do most of this on your

[10:11] own. Uh we also don't know if we need all of the, you know, component apps there, Ghidra, for instance, or IDA. Obviously, they did help uh replicate speed, so I think that's pretty important. We can produce, you know, the plausible um um visual and like back-end analog of any app with RAE. We can also do it visually in like probably a uh 2/3 of the time, if not faster, um just by using vanilla agents. So, while there is a little bit of a speed bump there, I just want you guys to know that most of this will probably be just captured by agents in general. So, get ready for the reverse

[10:40] engineer era. All right. Hopefully, you guys appreciated the video. Had a lot of fun putting it together, and I will catch all y'all in the next one.

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