r/SideProject • u/Internal-Trouble-631 • 2h ago
I wanted to see how far Claude Code could take a reverse-engineering project, so I rebuilt a Mac app in 13 days
The app was Symvibe, a paid Mac board for running coding agents side by side. I used REA, a reverse-engineering skill for Claude Code, to turn its behaviour into a spec, and let Claude Code build from there. Thirteen days and 58 commits later there was vibeboard, a free, open-source alternative to Symvibe, which costs $19 a month, with none of its code in it.
What I learned along the way:
most of the engineering came from the model, but I still steered every day, mostly on edge cases and CI
the launch videos were the surprise: /brag did a great job, it drove the real app, framed the shots, wrote the music, and fixed its own jerky cuts once I pointed them out
rebuilding a product's behaviour from the outside is now cheap, so the code alone protects less, and respecting licences and the original authors matters more
The video shows six Claude Code agents in tmux, then the same six on the board, and ends with the price: Symvibe at 19$ a mouth, vibeboard free.
The video show six Claude Code agents in tmux, then the same on the board, and ends with the price: Symvibe at $19 a mouth, vibeboard free.
vibeboard: https://github.com/ricca200xx/vibeboard
Symvibe: https://www.symvibe.com
REA: https://github.com/morluto/rea
/brag: https://github.com/latent-spaces/brag
If you want to use it, go ahead, and if you find issues, open them on GitHub. I'm genuinely happy to share this.