'Reverse Engineer Anything' Project Hits 342,000 GitHub Stars

A GitHub project called Reverse Engineer Anything has crossed 342,000 stars. Its pitch, reported by 404 Media: "See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project."

That workflow is bleeding past hobbyists. 404 Media quotes a guitar pedal maker posting on Hacker News: "In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products... Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip off any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor."

The consumer version is quieter and weirder. A user named Gathin posted: "Vibe coded my parents' TV this afternoon! 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... Looks like an Apple TV now lol." The post reportedly drew more than 6 million views on X.

Mike Nolan, an open-source software politics researcher, told 404 Media: "All I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model... It's becoming so easy to recreate the functionality that you want [with AI.]" His caveat sits alongside: "there's a lot of work associated with maintaining software so there may be a lot of instances where the software may not be reliable enough to use."

Lululemon, Xiaomi, Netflix, Adobe, and Microsoft Office all surface in the reporting as cloning or modification targets, with Anthropic's Claude as the tool of choice. The 404 Media Podcast walked through the piece this week, and two researchers we follow flagged it the day it ran.