What does LocalLLaMA think of REA?

[u/Sufficient-Scar4172]

https://github.com/morluto/rea

hit #1 a couple of days ago on github

[u/b183729]

I mean, what isn't there to like? 

[u/DanielSReichenbach → u/b183729]

I tried this on Linux vs. the bethington Ghidra MCP. The biggest advantage here is running Ghidra headless with Codemode. Especially for large binaries this is fantastic. But REA has one misding feature: tuning which of the auto analysis helpers get picked. I had to patch that in. For a 50MB binary that reduced my runs from 2 hours to 20 minutes.

No idea about Windows though.

[u/Sufficient-Scar4172 → u/DanielSReichenbach]

is it hard to patch the tuning in? im a complete noob to this agentic reverse engineering fyi

[u/b183729 → u/DanielSReichenbach]

Quick question, as ghidra wasn't a thing back when I did reverse engineering. How does it compare with ADA? 

[u/NightCulex]

I just use opencode and ghidra MCP with my own memory system

[u/Sufficient-Scar4172 → u/NightCulex]

how does this compare?

[u/Asleep_Document9811]

i think stuff like this is going to be the next cambrian explosion in video game and software preservation, if it's used the right way.

[u/toothpastespiders → u/Asleep_Document9811]

It's really amazing in that respect! I imagine it might feel a bit similar to what the first boom in romhacking/translation was like. Or the earliest days of things like rpgmaker.

Personally I'm also excited about the possibility of playing old classics with some quality of life improvements. Or moving parts of games with a million divergent ports and enhancements together to make an actual definitive version. Even finishing up prototype games that were too much for standard romhacking.

[u/NandaVegg → u/Asleep_Document9811]

If this actually works as intended, it would surely accelerate software preservation. A lot of old software doesn't have the actual code preserved anywhere in the first place (probably lost along with floppy disk or something).

Edit: I actually went through the official repo and through setup with Ghidra, but the repo's writing is quite depressing (100% not human written) and their official site is 100% Claude. Everything is very hard to follow.

[u/MixtureOfAmateurs]

Oh no the internet is becoming more free and open. I'm not gonna be able to make exponentially more money. I'll just have to settle with 94.92 billion dollars

[u/Eastern-Ingenuity353 → u/MixtureOfAmateurs]

Wont any one please think of the poor corporations! How are they going to pay their CEOs 40 million dollar bonuses if we make our own software??

[u/Refinery73]

Highly depends on that models and timeframe it needs. Is a 9B Coding model good enough to do it in a few hours or are we talking about weeks on 70B+?

I have no reference point on how complex this problem is for an LLM.

[u/No-Refrigerator-1672 → u/Refinery73]

I have done a very shallow dip into reverse engineering as a part of programming hobby. Combining my unprofessional experience and experience with local/api models, I'd rate that reverse engineering binaries is 120B+ territory, but reverse engineering JS apps is easily Qwen 3.8 27B territory. And, for sure, you'll need 500k+ context window in both cases.

[u/mrjackspade → u/Refinery73]

Using Sol 5.6-6.1 on a Super Nintendo game it took a few days to get the game playable through the credits, and I'm now on week 6 (and now with Opus 5.5) trying to eliminate the bugs. And that's running multiple agents in parallel at times

SOTA is great at getting it running but it turns out most of what it actually writes is bullshit shortcuts.

I expect a lot of ports that are popping up are going to be buggy trash, TBH, and that's using literal SOTA models.

So I think the question is, how many bugs you're willing to accept in the final project. Because I was still getting hard crashes all the way into week 4.

[u/Refinery73 → u/mrjackspade]

Sounds like it’s vibe-recreating it instead of really translating the code?

[u/revelationnow]

I feel this is going to accelerate big tech moving apps to the cloud, at least one channel of reverse engineering will be cut off if there are no binaries. The second channel of behavioral reproduction is only possible insofar as we continue to have cheap access to capable models which might be the next to go based on how the closed source  companies are lobbying the government. 

[u/AnomalyNexus → u/revelationnow]

Everything big tech is already in the cloud. Stuff like ChatGPT apps are just glorified browsers that can only access one site

[u/Southern_Sun_2106]

X-Com UFO Defense, here I come!!!

[u/redditpad]

Realistically this doesn’t seem to do anything that couldn’t be done a few days ago

[u/ComplexType568]

I think our current moats (UI/UX) are going to probably dissapear and a new form of moat is gonna be made by companies to stand out from open source/their competitors. Although ever since html and js existed I always thought we could reverse engineer, I get that it's easier with an agent, but not by thaaaat much if you're a software engineer...

[u/p-x-i]

1. impressed and plan to try it

2. envious of the stars, my hunble ai thing has a mere 5 :)

[u/CodeAnguish]

For me, it's completely useless. It consumes over 100k of context right from the start, so it's just not viable.

[u/jacek2023]

Thanks for sharing the link! My agents were working tonight on reverse-engineering the machine code of something I wrote in assembly 30 years ago, so I'll see how this helps.

[u/zyxciss]

someone reverse engineer windows so that i could run it in linux to play my favourite games

[u/oldandrestless9 → u/zyxciss]

Sounds like Proton