Reverse Engineer Anything Lets AI Agents Inspect Apps Like Notion

Reverse Engineer Anything (REA), an open-source tool that lets AI coding agents examine software without its source code, has published case studies showing an agent working through Notion's desktop app. In one, the agent locates the clipboard function in Notion's interface code, follows it through the app's internal messaging layers into its main process, and examines the format Notion uses for rich copied content.

The pitch to developers is that they can ask an agent how a feature in an existing app works, see the evidence, and then build something similar in their own product.

REA's other showcases go deeper. For DX-Ball, a 1990s brick-breaker game, the agent traced a sound function down to the calculation that sets stereo position and rewrote it in C; the project says the rebuilt code matches the original across 3,205 test cases and recreates all 63 bytes of the compiled function. A third case recovers how bullet patterns were calculated in TH04, a game originally released for NEC's PC-98 computers.

REA works as an MCP server and command-line tool. It connects agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI to analysis tools for native programs, JavaScript and Electron apps like Notion, .NET software, Android packages, firmware and websites. It does not decompile code itself; deep analysis of native programs relies on an existing install of Hopper, Ghidra or IDA. The project says analysis runs on the user's machine, while the agent's AI provider receives the results under its own data policy.

The project has grown quickly. GitHub data cited in a fact-check of the project shows the repository was set up in mid-April 2026, and it now lists about 304,000 stars and 77,000 forks. HackerNoon reported that REA topped GitHub's daily trending list on October 11, adding close to 26,000 stars in one day. AI Briefing News has not independently verified whether that growth is organic.

Its popularity has drawn imitators. On October 13, a user reported that an unofficial repository had copied REA's documentation and offered a Windows program that Microsoft Defender flagged as a trojan. REA's page now tells users to install only from the morluto/rea GitHub repository, the rea.tools website or the rea-agents npm package.

REA's documentation limits use to lawful purposes, such as research, interoperability, software preservation and analyzing software users own or have permission to examine. Reverse engineering commercial apps can still conflict with license terms or local law, and the case studies do not say whether Notion was consulted.

The maintainer publishes under the handle morluto and has not publicly identified themselves. REA has no published independent security audit.