I'll start with a confession. The first time our team at Devaigo opened REA, someone said, "Isn't this... illegal?"
It's a fair worry. But when we went back and read the history, we found something surprising: almost every big leap in personal computing started with someone taking something apart. REA isn't a new idea. It's an old idea that finally got cheap.
So this piece is part research note, part opinion. We've tried to keep it honest.
The quick version: what REA does
REA ("Reverse Engineer Anything") is an open-source, MIT-licensed tool that plugs into AI assistants like Claude, Cursor and Codex through MCP (Model Context Protocol). Once installed:
npx rea-agents setupyour AI can study how software behaves: from what an app does on screen, to its network calls, down to the native binary itself. You ask in plain English: "How does this app store offline data?" The agent digs and explains.
The history nobody tells founders
Here are the old cases we kept coming back to during our research.
1982–83: Compaq clones the IBM PC. IBM's BIOS was copyrighted. Compaq's engineers used a "clean room" method: one team studied what the BIOS did and wrote a description; a second team, who never saw IBM's code, wrote fresh code from that description. Compaq's Portable sold over 53,000 units in its first year. The entire "PC compatible" industry grew from that.
1984: Phoenix Technologies did the same thing and sold its clean-room BIOS to anyone. Suddenly dozens of companies could build PCs. Prices fell. That's why computers reached ordinary homes and offices, including in India.
1992: Sega v. Accolade (US). Accolade disassembled Sega Genesis cartridges just to learn how to make compatible games. The court said that copying code to understand how it works, for compatibility, can be fair use. That ruling still gets quoted today.
1992 onwards: Samba. Andrew Tridgell reverse engineered Microsoft's file-sharing protocol (SMB) by watching network traffic. Samba is the reason Linux servers and Windows PCs talk to each other in millions of offices.
2000: Sony v. Connectix. Connectix reverse engineered the PlayStation BIOS to build an emulator for Mac. The court again sided with the reverse engineer.
2019: the NSA gives away Ghidra. The US National Security Agency released its own reverse engineering tool, Ghidra, for free at the RSA Conference. Before that, serious analysis meant tools like IDA Pro that cost thousands of dollars per licence.
Our take: Look at the pattern. Every 10–15 years, the cost of understanding software drops by a big step: from expert teams, to expensive tools, to free tools. REA is the next step: from free tools that need an expert, to an AI that is a junior expert.
What the law in India actually says
Many founders don't know this. India's Copyright Act, 1957, Section 52(1)(ab) allows doing what's needed to get information for interoperability of an independently created program, if that information isn't readily available. Section 52(1)(ac) allows observing, studying and testing a program to understand its ideas, while you're using it lawfully.
The EU has a similar rule in its 1991 Software Directive (Article 6).
So in plain terms: studying how software works so yours can work with it, or to learn the underlying idea, has a legal basis. Copying the code itself does not. That line matters, and we'll come back to it.
Facts about REA you won't easily find in search
From REA's own project page (as of our research):
- It has close to 3,900 commits and 39 releases: this is not a weekend demo.
- It can inspect AI model files, not just apps. That's rare.
- It can run fully on your own machine, so you don't need to send private binaries to a cloud.
- It works across macOS, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS targets, and web apps.
Our R&D view: where REA genuinely helps
We tried to think like a research team, not a fan club. These are the uses we think hold up:
- Competitive research without guessing. Instead of reading a rival's blog and guessing their stack, you understand the approach, then build your own version. That's exactly what Compaq did.
- Security audits of what you already use. Small Indian companies run tools they've never looked inside. REA lets you check what a third-party SDK actually sends out.
- Legacy rescue. We regularly meet businesses running old software whose vendor has vanished. Understanding the binary is often the only way to migrate the data.
- Learning. A student in a tier-2 city can now learn how a real app works with the same depth as an engineer at a large company.
Our honest worry: AI agents can be confidently wrong. In our tests, you still need a human to check what the agent claims. Treat REA's output as a research lead, not a final answer.
What we'd tell a founder today
- Use REA to understand ideas, then write your own code. Never paste copied code into your product.
- Keep a simple research log: what you studied, why, and what you built from scratch. That's the modern version of a clean room.
- Read the licence and terms of whatever you study.
Let's build it the right way, together
At Devaigo, we help startups and businesses use AI agents for real R&D: product research, security checks, legacy migrations and building custom AI tools, with the legal common sense built in.
Want to know how a feature works, and how to build your own version faster?
📧 info@devaigo.com
📞 +91 9625208088
Tell us what you're trying to build. The first conversation is free, and we'll tell you honestly if REA (or AI at all) is the right fit.
Note: This article is for general information and is not legal advice. Laws differ by country; check with a lawyer before reverse engineering any commercial product.
