Is REA the end of closed-source software? The person who replicated Adobe's entire suite refuses to use it.

Beating AI News Flash: The reverse-engineering tool REA has recently gone viral, with developer Matthew Berman even declaring that "software is dead." But Brandon Thomas, founder of ArtCraft, who is using AI to replicate the entire Adobe suite, has publicly stated that he will not use REA. On Hacker News, he emphasized that his team does not decompile commercial software and also prohibits the use of reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra, fearing copyright litigation as a result.

Thomas is using Claude Opus 5.5 to develop a series of free open-source software in Rust. Seven of them target Adobe products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. Recently, he has shifted his aim to Microsoft, launching projects targeting Word, Excel, and PowerPoint respectively. However, these software products still have a long way to go before they can truly replace the originals. Hands-on testing found that PhotoCraft cannot open HEIC photos commonly used on iPhones, while FilmCraft even has problems with some basic editing operations and audio playback.

REA allows Agents such as Claude Code to call tools including Ghidra and IDA to analyze software without publicly available source code and recreate its functions based on the analysis results. Thomas, however, insists on another development approach: referring only to public technical documentation and the software's actual behavior, writing code from scratch, and not touching the original's internal implementation. This practice is called "clean room" development.

He believes that using REA for personal research or for studying abandoned software may be fine, but if it is used to decompile commercial software and then publicly release imitations, once the original's proprietary code is involved, it could lead to litigation.