# REA Reverse-Engineer Anything

14 Hacker News commenters recommended REA Reverse-Engineer Anything and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open source AI assistant for reverse engineering in Ghidra, praised as surprisingly powerful; the main caveat is that critics doubt it beats doing the work yourself with general AI tools.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong low-level code reverse engineering (3 comments): "REA shows that ai are very good at understanding low level code and reverse engineering it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028819)) "it's a lot better quality than a lot of AI decomps I've seen" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029703)) "It's surprisingly powerful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090354))
- Free, open source, good starting point (2 comments): "Thanks for sharing and making this open source." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028552)) "which is a good place to start" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036946))

## What people warn about

- Not better than existing alternatives (3 comments): "it's probably cheaper and more time-effective to use something that already exists and does the job" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029426)) "I don't think it is better than just doing it yourself in Claude Code (in fact worse)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028619)) "Probably it is not better." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028840))
- Risky curl-bash style installation (3 comments): "seems like an evolution of `wget X | bash`-style in all the worst ways" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030587)) "We have achieved the next evolution of installation by `curl | bash`!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028433)) "it's much safer to click next > next > next > next > finish" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028496))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ghidra](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghidra.md): 80 recommend
- [GhidraMCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghidra-mcp.md): 30 recommend
- [IDA Pro](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ida-pro.md): 25 recommend
- [Binary Ninja](https://hackerapproved.com/p/binary-ninja.md): 13 recommend
- [Kampala](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kampala.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "REA Reverse-Engineer Anything", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rea-reverse-engineer-anything/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).