Is REA the death knell for closed-source software? The developer who cloned Adobe’s entire software suite refuses to use it.

Beating AI News Flash (Dongcha Insight) – Reverse engineering tool REA has surged in popularity recently, with its developer Matthew Berman even declaring "software is dead". However, Brandon Thomas, founder of ArtCraft which is using AI to replicate Adobe’s entire software suite, has publicly stated he will not use REA. On Hacker News, Thomas emphasized his team does not decompile commercial software and prohibits reverse engineering tools like Ghidra, over concerns of potential copyright lawsuits. Thomas is leveraging Claude Opus 5.5 to develop a series of free open-source software using Rust. Seven of these tools are designed to match Adobe products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. Recently, he has shifted his focus to Microsoft, launching projects corresponding to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint respectively. Still, these tools are far from replacing the original versions. Testing found PhotoCraft cannot open HEIC photos (a common iPhone format), while FilmCraft has issues with basic editing operations and audio playback. REA allows agents like Claude Code to call tools such as Ghidra and IDA to analyze software with no public source code, then reimplement its functions based on the analysis results. Thomas, however, adheres to a different development approach: he only references public technical documentation and the actual performance of software, writes code from scratch, and avoids accessing the original software’s internal implementations. This method is known as "clean room" development. He believes REA may be acceptable for personal research or studying abandoned software, but using it to decompile commercial software and then releasing counterfeit versions publicly could lead to lawsuits if proprietary code from the original software is involved.