REA's 'replicate any software' put to the test: 51 public attempts, successes mostly limited to partial functions.

Beating AI News Flash: Independent technical author quanglee reviewed 51 public records of REA usage and found that so-called "successful replication" often only means reproducing a single feature. On October 12, he published his investigation results: 9 of these came from REA project contributors, all of whom completed their respective goals; of the other 42 independent attempts, 20 were completed, 16 partially completed, and 6 failed.

The problem lies in the standard for "completion." Among the 20 independent success cases, 9 targeted mini-games or mini-programs, 6 only reproduced a certain feature of larger software, and 5 did not even disclose the target name. One relatively impressive case is the puzzle game Untangle: after the Agent analyzed its 167 KB program, it produced a playable web version, with 52 of 54 technical conclusions completely correct. However, a post-hoc audit by the developer found that 10 of the function and field names did not come from REA's analysis results, and may have been the model remembering the original's public source code.

More complex projects require a large amount of work. In REA contributors' reverse engineering of "Imperishable Night," 1,106 of 1,107 functions matched the original machine code, but it took about two weeks and built on prior manual research. Another person attempted to replicate the voice input software Wispr Flow. Although part of the recording, transcription, and text-pasting workflow was analyzed, in the end only a 64-line Python script was produced. Functions such as the cloud model, context processing, and real-time feedback that the original relies on were not fully reproduced.

REA can help Agents call tools such as Ghidra and IDA to analyze existing programs and recreate some features. But the capabilities of a commercial software product do not exist only in the installation package. The models, data, and complex business logic on the server cannot be directly restored simply by decompiling the client.