Over the weekend it became fashionable to replace the software on smart TVs with AI-written systems that are leaner and free of ads. The same approach is spreading to digital frames, baby monitors and smart mirrors abandoned by their makers, which are coming back to life with new software.
The mechanism is always the same: a coding agent analyses an existing product, reconstructs its features and reproduces them, or installs an open-source version on the hardware. The result is a hybrid of vibe coding, decompilation and reverse engineering, with an obvious risk of plagiarism. But the phenomenon also stems from people wanting to regain control of devices that restrict basic functions, insert ads or collect data.
Reverse Engineer
One user, Gathin, posted on X that he had done this with his parents' TV: Claude Code found the set on the Wi-Fi network, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher. The post reportedly drew more than 6 million views. Open-source projects already offer similar solutions, such as dumbtv, which promises to strip ads and tracking from Android TVs, and Claude Opus 5.5's application to games shows the same logic already extending to videogame modding.
The project that sparked the debate is REA, Reverse Engineer Anything, which has passed 342,000 stars on GitHub. It uses AI agents to break down the functions of other applications without access to their source code and recreate them in one's own product. According to InfoQ, REA runs locally, connecting agents such as Claude Code and Codex to tools like Ghidra, Hopper and IDA, and does not claim to recover original source code. Perplexity has already integrated it into its Computer agent through the /reverse-engineer command, offering up to 10,000 free credits per user until October 31.
The phenomenon also reaches everyday software. In recent weeks AI clones of Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office have appeared, while a developer rebuilt much of Modern Warfare 2 in three months. A guitar-pedal maker said he cloned the algorithms of three competitors in 72 hours.
How To Reverse Engineer Anything Even If You Don't Have One! - YouTube
Experts urge caution. Mike Nolan, who studies open-source politics, observes that software-as-a-service looks to be in trouble as a business model, but that maintaining software remains costly and it is unclear how many companies will adopt these clones. Georg Zoeller, quoted by the Telegraph, argues there are no more secrets in software and its value will fall quickly.
AI-generated clones are often not true decompilations: the resulting code differs from the original and can contain bugs its users do not know how to fix. The biggest risk concerns networked devices. Fragile software installed on critical hardware can open the door to attacks, and reverse-engineering communities and open-source projects could be flooded with low-quality contributions.
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