REA gives AI coding agents the tools to reverse engineer software

Reverse engineering usually means staring at assembly code until your eyes bleed, but a new tool lets your AI agent do the decoding for you.

REA hooks into coding agents to let them inspect compiled binaries and web scripts directly. Instead of tracing hex offsets yourself, you ask your agent plain questions like why Windows Calculator outputs 220 for 200 + 10%. The project racked up 696 points on Hacker News after showing agents reading calc.exe assembly and extracting speed rules from Chrome's dinosaur game.

Why it matters: Understanding legacy apps or binary behavior normally takes hours of manual disassembly. REA feeds decompiled code and call trees straight to your agent, letting it explain logic branches or rebuild target features in minutes.

To try it, run npx rea-agents@latest setup in your terminal, approve the plan, and restart your agent.

Now you can finally figure out why that legacy app behaves so strangely without reading raw assembly.