REA: you should absolutely use it — reverse engineering is learning, not plagiarism

REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) blew up — 200k+ stars, plus a wave of panic.

Most reviews circle one question: "Will it ruin the software industry?"

My take is blunt. Five points:

1. You should absolutely use it

It drives the cost of "understanding a piece of software" from weeks or years of skill down to minutes — an AI driving Hopper/Ghidra hands you pseudocode, call graphs and evidence.

For an engineer, that's leverage. Refusing to use leverage is choosing to fight with one hand tied behind your back.

Want to try it? The free Ghidra engine is enough; it downloads slowly in China — grab it with my downloader (GitHub: https://github.com/zishuowang696/gh-download), 543 MB at 4.7 MiB/s. Then practice by decompiling a Hello World with an agent.

2. The premise: reverse-engineer valuable products

Not some random toy. Aim at the best product in your field — the one you use daily, the one you most want to learn from.

Study how it's designed, how it ships, what trade-offs it made — that's the fastest way to learn by comparison. Same idea as "copy the masters to learn to paint, read the schematics to learn hardware, read the source to learn algorithms."

3. Learning is not a crime

Reverse engineering ≠ piracy.

"Reading someone's implementation to learn" is a centuries-old human practice. The law has never been about whether you looked — it's about whether you copied, distributed, or bypassed licensing.

Looking, understanding, learning — is not a crime.

4. NOT learning this way is what really sets you back

AI has driven the cost of "understanding any software" to the floor:

Your colleagues are learning with it; your competitors are learning with it;
If you don't, that's not "playing by the rules" — it's choosing to fall behind.

For individuals — and even more for companies. A generation that won't learn this way ships products that get outrun.

5. But — this is not permission to plagiarize

To avoid any misunderstanding, draw the line:

Doing this	Verdict
Learning the ideas / architecture / trade-offs	✅ Legit
Copying code, bypassing licensing, shipping a competitor's feature into your product, scraping user data	❌ Illegal / breach — do it and you're done

REA gives you evidence + understanding, not a finished product. The correct posture is:

Understand → reimplement in your own way → stay compliant.

That's exactly what the official showcases do: DX-Ball and TH04 rewrite the recovered algorithms into their own C/C++.

The point

Use REA to study the best products in your field. Learning isn't a crime. But reimplement what you learn, in your own way.

That's not plagiarism — that's skill.