From GTA V on iPhone to Free Photoshop: This AI Tool Is Upending Software

Would you like to kill a boss in Skyrim using an AK47 from Counter Strike? Give your NPCs a real genius-level brain that gives you unique answers instead of predefined strings of text? Would you like to run GTA V on your iPhone? What about using paid software for free, and legally? Well, people are doing that and more with AI right now.

A free tool that lets AI agents pull apart almost any piece of software has become the hottest project on GitHub, jumping from fewer than 10,000 stars on October 6 to more than 100,000 by Monday.

It’s called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything. Stars are GitHub’s version of a bookmark, and REA collected more than 30,000 of them on October 11 alone, after sitting mostly ignored since its creation in April.

How REA works

Apps and games ship as machine code, the raw instructions a processor reads and humans basically can’t. Decompiling tries to turn that back into readable code, a bit like tasting a cake and working backward to the recipe.

Reverse engineering is the bigger umbrella: figuring out how something works without its blueprints, whether by watching what an app does and the data it sends, or by reading its code. This repository does exactly that.

In practice, a user points an agent at a program, asks how one feature works, and lets it dig from what happens on screen all the way down to the binary. It works on desktop apps, Android apps, and websites.

REA hooks AI coding assistants such as Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex up to the professional tools that do that job, like Ghidra, the reverse-engineering suite the NSA released to the public in 2019. The bridge is MCP, the Model Context Protocol, a standard Anthropic created so AI models can plug into outside tools—basically a universal adapter.

The developer’s “readme” file itself is far more modest than the hype, stating that REA “does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application.” It doesn’t even ship its own decompiler.

This actually makes the whole operation legal(ish). The developer has never read the code, and just ships a similarly coded alternative that does exactly the same, but isn’t exactly the same.

The gates are open

People are doing all sorts of weird things with REA. For example, some players ended up watching Spider-Man swing through the Gotham of Batman: Arkham City, and creepers fight Elden Ring boss Malenia after someone stuffed about 1,600 Minecraft items into FromSoftware’s game. Another modder dropped Escape from Tarkov’s guns and menus into Skyrim and called it “Escape from Skyrim lol.”

Old console exclusives are escaping their consoles too: In September, a fan used an open-source AI model and a recompilation toolkit to bring Fable 2, the only mainline Fable game never released on PC, to Windows. The AI got it booting in about an hour, followed by a long stretch of manual fixes. Another one got to run GTV on iOS fluidly—something not even Rockstar Games bothered doing.

Using these techniques (not the tools), developer Brandon Thomas took the idea to software people pay for every month, using Claude Opus 5.5 to build ArtCraft, a set of free, open-source apps written in Rust that mirror Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom and other Adobe programs, for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Thomas says he snapped after Adobe charged him its cancellation fee one too many times. He isn’t alone in that grudge: Adobe agreed in March to a $150 million settlement with the Justice Department, which accused it of hiding early termination fees and making subscriptions a pain to cancel, though the company denied wrongdoing.

ArtCraft isn’t built with REA, and Thomas calls the project a clean-room rebuild, meaning the code is written from scratch using public documentation and observed behavior, never the original code, the same legal approach Compaq used to clone IBM’s PC BIOS in the 1980s.

The apps are labeled “early alpha” or “in development” on the project’s site, and one pixel artist has already called the Photoshop clone “completely unusable.”

Anything that runs on your own device can now be read by an AI agent with enough patience and tokens, which erodes the oldest copy protection in software: the sheer pain of reading machine code. That means cheaper clones and better game preservation, but also easier piracy and fewer places for security flaws to hide.

Activision has already pulled footage of an AI-decompiled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Bethesda sent a cease-and-desist letter over an AI-made browser game called Fallout: New York.

That seems to be the only defense studios have against a trend that may easily force open source everything.

REA, meanwhile, keeps shipping, with eight releases between October 3 and October 11. Thomas has already walked back his promise to match Adobe’s feature set within a month, and now says it will take months.