TECH NEWS

I Tested REA, GitHub’s Viral Reverse Engineering Tool, on a Real Electron App

On Sunday morning, 11 October, REA was number one on GitHub's daily trending page, with 25,793 stars gained in a single day. The repo showed 76,998 stars and 16,440 forks. The pitch is simple: "Reverse engineer anything with agents." You install an MCP server, and your coding agent can take apart native binaries, Electron apps, websites, Android APKs and more, then show you the evidence.

I'm wary of anything that gets that famous that fast, so I skipped the README demos. I installed it on a plain Linux box, pointed it at a real 100 MB Electron app, and then built a tiny app where I know every right answer, to see how well it grades itself.

Short version: the static JavaScript analysis is genuinely good and fast. It also missed something I could see with grep, and what it asks of an agent is heavy. Details below.