REA Reverse – Engineer Anything
- ID
- 33977
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 10 Oct 2026, 8:37 AM
- Fetched
- 10 Oct 2026, 3:45 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://rea.tools/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 10 Oct 2026, 3:45 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_agent_users
What happened
REA (rea.tools) is a tool that connects to a coding agent and gives it reverse-engineering capabilities, installed with `npx rea-agents@latest setup`. Its demo asks the agent why Windows Calculator returns 220 for 200 + 10%, and the agent answers by reading the handler's instructions, decompiled code and calls — showing the % button takes 10% of the first operand (10% of 200 = 20, then 200 + 20 = 220) rather than the manual path of decoding x64 branches (0x5b = Divide, 0x5c = Multiply) and tracing calls by hand. The Hacker News thread drew 299 points and 95 comments.
Why it matters
If you use a coding agent for interop, legacy-binary, or proprietary-format work, this is a one-command thing to trial: `npx rea-agents@latest setup` connects the agent to program inspection rather than guesswork. The concrete decision is whether agent-assisted RE beats your current manual workflow on a real binary you own or are licensed to inspect — the page is vendor material with a curated Calculator example, so test it on your own target before trusting the explanations.
Discussion angle
Agent-assisted reverse engineering changes who can inspect a binary — what breaks first: licensing/ToS boundaries, or trust in the agent's explanation when the decompiled output is wrong?