Reverse-Engineered Romhacks Hit 100K GitHub Stars, And Your iPhone Now Runs $RDR Mods

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. The repository, called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, collected more than 30,000 stars on October 11 alone after sitting mostly ignored since its creation in April.

REA hooks AI coding assistants such as Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex up to professional reverse-engineering suites including Ghidra, the toolkit 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. 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.

The developer's readme file is far more modest than the hype, stating that REA "does not claim to recover original source code or automatically clone an application." It does not ship its own decompiler, and the developer has never read the code, instead shipping similarly coded alternatives that perform the same functions. Projects built with the tool include Spider-Man swinging through the Gotham of Batman: Arkham City, creepers fighting Elden Ring boss Malenia after about 1,600 Minecraft items were stuffed into FromSoftware's game, and a mod called "Escape from Skyrim lol" that dropped Escape from Tarkov's guns and menus into Skyrim.

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 project got GTA V running natively on iOS, something Rockstar Games has not released themselves.