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All Software Is Becoming Readable and Open Source
How to use REA and the clean-room method to rebuild a real Mac app with Claude: a hands-on guide and a reflection
“Pretty soon all software will be de facto open-source. AI is coming for everything and everyone.”
Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, posted that on October 7. For decades the deal has been simple: you get the app, and the company keeps the code. If he’s right, that deal is over.
He was reacting to AI tools that take finished apps apart.
The same day, a free tool called REA was announced, and a week later it had more than 230,000 stars on GitHub. It lets Claude Code open many apps you’ve only downloaded and explain how they work inside.
My goal is to see how far his claim holds. I’ll explain what REA is and how it works, then set it up in three steps. Then I’ll test it on a real Mac app: one Claude session studies the app and takes notes, another rebuilds it from those notes, and I check whether the copy behaves like the original. I’ll end with what this means beyond one small app.
Note: this is a learning experiment in a legal gray area. The app’s license forbids reverse engineering except where the law…
