Every app on Earth is now open source... whether it likes it or not

Summary

A solo developer named Brandon Thomas created ArtCraft, an open source project aiming to rebuild core Adobe Creative Cloud applications in pure Rust. Motivated by frustration with Adobe subscription costs and cancellation fees, Thomas used Anthropic Claude to recreate programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere as native, cross-platform apps including Linux support. Testing the video editor FilmCraft reveals an interface identical to Adobe Premiere Pro. However, actual usage highlights major shortcomings, such as audio playback latency, sluggish timeline manipulation, and unrefined video transition effects that fall far short of professional production standards.

To overcome these usability hurdles, developers are turning to tools like Reverse Engineer Anything, known as REA. REA is an open source toolkit that allows AI agents to inspect compiled software binaries at the machine level without needing original source code. It handles multiple binary targets, such as stripped ELF and Mach-O files, Windows Portable Executable files, JVM bytecode, .NET assemblies, and bare-metal firmware. By connecting language models to decompilation utilities, REA enables programmers to determine exactly how closed source programs execute complex operations.

Configuring REA through Node.js and the npx command allows it to run alongside AI coding agents such as Claude Code. On Windows systems, REA integrates with the National Security Agency Ghidra framework to perform read-only static analysis on local executable and dynamic link library files. An agent can target installed Adobe Premiere Pro binaries, locating timeline integration routines and decoding project file serialization. The resulting decompilation yields pseudo-C source, assembly instructions, strings, and symbols, revealing how Premiere handles timeline tracks, clips, and sequences.

While raw decompiled assembly and pseudo-C code are difficult to read, an AI coding agent can digest the output and rewrite the identified logic directly into clean Rust code. This process allows developers to reconstruct specialized modules, such as a lightweight timeline file reader, without inheriting unwanted legacy features. The same reverse engineering approach applies to cloud applications and web platforms, where agents analyze browser network interactions to extract API schemas and reproduce specialized backends.