'Reverse Engineer Anything' hits 342,000 stars as cloning spreads

Over the weekend, people started using AI to rip the operating systems off their smart TVs. 'Vibe coded my parents' TV this afternoon!' an X user named Gathin wrote. 'It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix. Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.' 404 Media reports that post 'has allegedly been viewed more than 6 million times,' and the same days saw AI-written firmware strip ads from baby monitors, turn smart picture frames into AI calendars, and revive bricked Lululemon mirrors.

Driving the surge is a GitHub project called 'Reverse Engineer Anything,' which 404 Media says has become 'one of the most viral GitHub repositories in recent memory, with more than 342,000 stars.' It is a free add-on that wires AI coding agents like Claude Code into professional reverse-engineering tools, so a model can take an existing app apart, work out how one feature behaves, and rebuild it in a new project.

Author Jason Koebler frames the result flatly: 'All of this is some mix of "decompiling," "reverse-engineering," "hacking," vibe coding, AI slop, and stealing.'

Mike Nolan, who studies the politics of open-source software, told 404 Media that 'all I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model,' because 'it\'s becoming so easy to recreate the functionality that you want.' Nolan added that 'the barrier for recreating this stuff is lower, so a lot of people are doing it for fun.'

There is a security tail. Koebler writes that 'poorly coded, barely-functional, insecure software is going to be installed on critical hardware, which will lead to devices and networks being hacked.' The piece follows 404 Media's earlier report that a video game reverse-engineering community shut down because AI-driven clones had overrun the work, and four of the researchers we follow in our Who's Who tracker shared it the day it ran.