Your Agent Can Reverse Engineer Now

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-10-10 — Hacker News

There's a calculator that multiplies differently than you'd expect. Press 200, then +, then 10%. It gives 220, not 20.

Why?

For decades, the answer was: learn reverse engineering. Pick up a disassembler. Dig through assembly. Trace calls by hand. Move findings between tools. It's a skill. Deep. Most developers never had time for it.

REA changes that math.

The agent investigates, shows you the evidence it found, and then rebuilds the feature for your own project. No manual tracing. No specialist. No weeks.

The premise sounds simple. The execution is not.

When you ask REA to explain how calculator's percentage button works, it doesn't guess. It loads the actual running application, finds the handler in memory, dumps the decompiled instructions, follows the branches, labels the operators, traces the values, and reconstructs the rule. For addition, 10% of 200 becomes 20, then adds to 200. For multiplication, 10% becomes 0.1. Different paths. Same button. Your agent sees both.

There are actually three layers to how this works, more or less. First, REA decompiles the target—recovers readable code, strings, symbol names, anything that hints at what's happening. Then your agent understands it, following the code from one function to another until it can explain the feature in plain terms. Finally, it recreates. Takes what it learned and turns it into a feature you can drop into your own codebase.

The dinosaur game example is messier but sharper. The game speeds up as you play. REA inspects the running script, finds the acceleration rule—start at 6, add 0.001 each frame, max out at 13—and returns it to the agent. The agent rebuilds the game, adds a slider for speed, and you can now tweak the original rule or set your own pace.

What makes this less obvious than it sounds is that REA doesn't pretend to recover the original source code. Actually, that's not quite right—it's explicit about what it won't do. It hands the agent pseudocode, assembly, symbols, and relationships. It shows evidence behind every claim. But it stops short of saying "this is the source." It never does. That honesty matters more than it sounds.

The tool runs locally. Your machine. Your analysis. Nothing leaves. That's a constraint built in, not bolted on later.

Setup is a single command. The installer previews what it'll touch, asks which agents you want to wire up—Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, others—and then you're done. You can run it from a terminal or call it from inside an agent session through an MCP server. Same capabilities either way.

The practical consequence is this: features you want to understand or rebuild are no longer locked behind specialist knowledge. You ask your agent. It investigates. You iterate.

Which changes what problems you can actually solve.

Source: "REA gives coding agents evidence-based reverse-engineering tools." — Level Up Coding

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