REA is an open source tool that has gathered more than 60,000 stars on GitHub in a short time. It gives your coding agent access to the tools specialists use for reverse engineering. You point at an app, ask the agent to work out how a feature works, and get an explanation, the evidence and a version you can build on yourself. You don’t need the source code.
In one of the project’s examples, the agent follows Notion’s copy function all the way through the app and into the format the text is stored in. In another, it recreates a function from the 90s game DX-Ball from the machine code alone, and the new code gives the same result as the original in 3,205 test cases.
It is one more step in something I have written about before. First it became cheap to build. Then the agent could copy the look of another product. Now it can also copy how it works.
The product can be copied, the business is harder
If a competitor spots something clever in your product, they can have a working version in the next sprint. So can you, the other way round. That makes the product the part of the company that is easiest to make again.
The business is harder. It consists of customers who trust you, data they have kept with you for years, a price they are willing to pay, and a route to them that works. It also consists of the decision about which problem is worth solving. None of that is in the code, and an agent cannot decompile it.
REA itself says you are responsible for having permission, and many licence terms forbid decompiling. So try it on your own product first. See what an agent can read out of it, and ask yourselves what is left when a competitor can do the same.
That question is something I help product teams with as an advisor. Write to me via advisory if you want to have that conversation.
