Reverse Engineering Reverse Anything (REA)

REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, is an open-source MCP server and CLI by GitHub user morluto. It lets AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor drive real reverse engineering tools (Hopper, Ghidra, IDA, JADX, Binwalk and more) on programs they have no source code for. In October 2026 it went from fewer than 10,000 GitHub stars to more than 300,000 in eleven days. We go through where it came from, what it is (and isn't), what a session looks like, the showcases where the agent's rebuild was checked with tests (DX-Ball, Touhou 4, Windows Calculator), how to set it up, and the risks: prompt injection, no sandbox, and what gets sent to your AI provider. Star and download numbers are as of October 19, 2026. Sources: - REA repo: https://github.com/morluto/rea - REA website and showcases: https://rea.tools - DX-Ball showcase: https://rea.tools/showcase/dx-ball/ - Touhou 4 showcase: https://rea.tools/showcase/th04/ - Notion showcase: https://rea.tools/showcase/notion/ - npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/rea-agents - Security notes: https://github.com/morluto/rea/blob/main/SECURITY.md - Disclaimer: https://github.com/morluto/rea/blob/main/DISCLAIMER.md - Ghidra: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra - GhidraMCP: https://github.com/LaurieWired/GhidraMCP - Star growth report: https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/ai-tool-rea-sparks-software-reverse-engineering-boom-on-github - Matthew Berman post: https://runtimewire.com/article/matthew-berman-rea-ai-reverse-engineering - ArtCraft mix-up: https://www.developersdigest.tech/blog/reverse-engineer-anything-rea-mcp-agents-guide-2026 Meme GIFs via GIPHY. Thumbnail photos (Wikimedia Commons, background removed): Keanu Reeves by Governo do Estado de São Paulo (CC BY 2.0); Steve Carell by Eva Rinaldi (CC BY-SA 2.0). ## Chapters 0:00 63 bytes from 1996 1:01 From Hopper add-on to 300k stars 2:06 Why reverse engineering is hard 3:08 What REA actually is 4:20 What a session looks like 5:42 The proof: tests 7:04 Setting it up 7:51 The risks 9:04 Try it small