Reverse engineering, the craft of understanding how a program works on the inside without its source code, gained a new partner in 2026: AI agents. In recent weeks, tools that connect AI to the field's classic programs have blown up on GitHub, and a developer released clones of Photoshop and other Adobe apps written with help from Claude. Here's what's happening and where the limits are.

REA: a reverse-engineering toolkit for agents

The most talked-about project is REA, short for "Reverse Engineer Anything." It works as an MCP server, the standard that lets an AI agent use other tools, and as a command-line program. In practice, the agent gets to operate well-known disassemblers and analyzers such as Ghidra, IDA and Hopper, plus tools for Android apps such as JADX and Apktool, and for network traffic.

REA passed 100,000 stars on GitHub in early October, according to developer Fabio Akita, who reviewed the project's code. It's MIT-licensed, and the repository spells out the rules: only analyze software you own or are authorized to examine, and pirated copies of commercial tools are not allowed. According to Akita, the contribution guide also rules out using the project to break DRM, anti-cheat or license protection.

Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom rebuilt in Rust

The case that went viral was ArtCraft, led by developer Brandon Thomas. The group released seven open-source programs that mimic Adobe apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Lightroom, all written in Rust. According to IT Connect's coverage, the work was done with several Claude Opus 5.5 agents running in parallel.

The best known is PhotoCraft, which runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. The project describes itself as alpha and warns that it doesn't yet replace Photoshop for professional work. OMG! Ubuntu tested it and concluded that the resemblance is more visual than practical: similar menus, shortcuts and icons don't mean the same results. The authors call the work a "clean room" reimplementation made without Adobe code, but that hasn't been independently verified.

Old games rebuilt

Games are where AI plus reverse engineering is already producing concrete results. The strongest example is Super Smash Bros. Melee, which just had all of its code rebuilt, with AI help in the final stretch. Other retro decompilation projects also report heavy AI use. The reason: in this kind of work, every function has an automatic check, so AI-suggested code either matches the original or gets thrown out.

The limits

  • Correctness: a 2025 study, DecompileBench, found that AI-based decompilers produce more readable code but get the behavior right far less often than commercial tools.
  • Modern software: rebuilding a GameCube game is not the same as copying a huge modern app. For Akita, the most valuable parts of Adobe's products, such as cloud services and licensed libraries, aren't even in the installed program.
  • Legal questions: reverse engineering for interoperability and preservation has favorable precedents in several countries, but distributing protected code or assets is still prohibited. Serious projects require users to own their copy of the software.

What's next

AI is likely to become a standard tool for anyone who studies software, from security researchers to people preserving old games. Portal GTA 6 will follow these projects in its AI section, always with sources and without sharing anything that enables piracy.