What Is REA? The 'Reverse Engineer Anything' AI Agent Toolkit, the Adobe/Excel Clone Hype, and the Legal Stakes (2026)

Short version: REA ("Reverse Engineer Anything") is a free, MIT-licensed open-source toolkit that connects AI coding agents to reverse-engineering tools like Ghidra so they can inspect software they don't have source code for. It took off on GitHub in October 2026. A lot of social posts say "REA cloned Photoshop and Excel." That isn't accurate: the Adobe- and Office-style apps people are passing around come from a separate project, ArtCraft, and both Decrypt and ArtCraft's developer say ArtCraft was not built with REA.

Not legal advice. This is an explainer, not a how-to.

What REA is

• What it does: REA is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server plus a command-line tool. It lets coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or Gemini CLI call specialist analysis tools for native binaries, JavaScript/Electron apps, .NET assemblies, Android packages and websites. (Source: project README, rea.tools)
• Who makes it: the public GitHub repository morluto/rea. It's listed in the official MCP Registry as io.github.morluto/rea. (Source: REA docs) We found no reporting on the person or people behind the account.
• What it does not do: it doesn't ship its own decompiler. Native analysis relies on Ghidra, Hopper or IDA installed on your machine. According to its README, REA "does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application." (Source: Decrypt, quoting the README)
• How it's used, at a high level: you ask your agent in plain English how a feature works. The agent asks REA for evidence (pseudocode, strings, network observations) and then explains the behavior or writes its own version. The project's flagship demo works out why Windows Calculator shows 220 for "200 + 10%." (Source: rea.tools)

Timeline (dated)

Date (2026)	Event	Source
April	REA repository created; it got little attention for months	Decrypt
Sept 30	Oldest commit in ArtCraft's Adobe-clone code (a separate project)	kurt.computer
Oct 3–11	REA ships eight releases	Decrypt
Oct 6	REA under 10,000 GitHub stars	Decrypt
Oct 7	ArtCraft adds WordCraft, GridCraft (Excel-style), DeckCraft, CADCraft and SoundCraft	kurt.computer
Oct 11	REA gains 30,000+ stars in one day; v6.4 adds Android device inspection over ADB and JEB integration	Decrypt; Magica
Oct 12	REA passes 100,000 stars	Decrypt

The "Adobe and Excel" part is ArtCraft, not REA

Developer Brandon Thomas (ArtCraft, Atlanta) used Claude Opus 5.5 to build free, Rust-based apps that mirror the interfaces and workflows of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom and other Adobe tools. The code is dual-licensed MIT/Apache 2.0. (Sources: Decrypt, kurt.computer) He calls the work a clean-room rebuild: written from public documentation and observed behavior, never from Adobe's code. Decrypt reports that ArtCraft "isn't built with REA." In October the project added Office-style apps, including GridCraft (Excel). (Sources: kurt.computer, ayu-sh-kr.com)

How well do they work? By the project's own labels, these apps are "early alpha" or "in development." The PhotoCraft repository itself lists gaps in generative features, tools, typography and plugin compatibility. (Source: ayu-sh-kr.com) Decrypt reports that one pixel artist called the Photoshop clone "completely unusable." Thomas has also walked back his promise to match Adobe's features within a month and now says it will take months. (Source: Decrypt) We found no independent benchmark of GridCraft against Excel.

Games: what's being credited to the AI-decompilation wave

Decrypt describes mods and ports made in this wave, including Spider-Man in Arkham City's Gotham, Minecraft items inside Elden Ring, an unofficial PC port of Fable 2, and a developer's claim that GTA V runs natively on iOS. These are claims, not verified results. Decrypt doesn't say all of them used REA specifically, and the Fable 2 port is described as using a different recompilation toolkit. For background, see our explainer on whether reverse-engineering games is legal.

Limits and costs

• Price: REA is free and open source. You still need a coding agent, and many of those require a paid plan (for example, Claude Code needs a paid Claude plan, according to rea.tools). Model usage costs tokens.
• Privacy: analysis runs on your own machine, but the findings are sent to your agent and so may reach its model provider. (Source: Magica)
• Accuracy: you get evidence and pseudocode, not the original source code. A human still has to judge what it means.

Legal and IP stakes

Being able to read software isn't the same as having the right to copy it. Adobe's General Terms of Use ban reverse engineering. According to kurt.computer, section 17(B) covers monitoring an app's inputs and outputs in order to recreate it. That outlet also found ArtCraft agent rules that allowed black-box observation of some Adobe apps, but says nothing public proves an agent actually did this. On the game side, Activision pulled footage of an AI-decompiled Modern Warfare 2, and Bethesda sent a cease-and-desist over an AI-made browser game, "Fallout: New York." (Source: Decrypt) Easier binary analysis also cuts both ways for security, as covered in our piece on AI game cheats and reverse engineering.

How Adobe and Microsoft have responded: in the sources we reviewed, we found no public statement from Adobe or Microsoft about REA or ArtCraft.

Bottom line

REA is real, it's popular, and it makes reverse engineering easier for anyone with a coding agent. But it's an investigation tool, not a one-click app cloner. The Adobe and Excel lookalikes come from a separate, early-alpha project, and the legal questions around both are far from settled.

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