No, we explicitly do not use reverse engineering. We do not decompile binaries, we do everything 100% clean room:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (inspired by Photoshop)

https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft (inspired by Word)

https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft (one of the more mature apps)

https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (another app close to 1:1 parity)

(etc.)

Using REA for something as high profile as what we're doing is likely to result in lawsuits. We're doing everything we can by the books.

We cannot look at Adobe sources. Use of Ghidra is disallowed.

REA is probably great for personal apps and for abandonware, but I think if you publish the results and it's found to have decompiled the original proprietary sources in discovery, you might be in for a bad time.

I built a from scratch rust RAW processing engine similar to the brains behind photoshop and lightroom - its much more powerful and its not even complete yet

Probably not, there's relatively little secret sauce to something like Photoshop. It's just a lot of grungy work that, I guess, you can now delegate to an agent if you have enough money and time.

As an aside, I've heard a lot of hot takes about how this is the end of Adobe, but I'm pretty sure it misses the point. The main reason people pay Adobe is because it's a familiar line of stable, well-supported, interoperable, and actively-developed products. There's already plenty of cheaper or free alternatives (Davinci Resolve for video, Capture One / Darktable for raw, Affinity for photo editing and vector drawing, etc), and if Adobe survived that, I sincerely doubt they're going to lose pro customers to a vibecoded app where half the stuff is probably subtly broken or left as a TODO, and that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.

yep. it is unexpectedly everywhere. like, overnight.

Probably it is not better. I think this is aimed at people who do not have a “current RE methodology”, do not know enough to specify things like Ghidra, etc., but who do have a desire to feel like they reverse-engineered and can reliably predict that a conversation with a chatbot will make them feel that way.

Everybody has their own set of skills and specific scripts and tools to do this stuff. You might use Ghidra as the the kernel of those workflows, but you still want something more than just Claude freestyling, at least for now.

(Who knows if this'll be true 6 months from now.)

We're using vanilla Claude Code for ArtCraft apps [1], but we are especially careful not to touch Ghidra. We don't want decompilations or reverse engineering to spoil the work we're doing and expose us to copyright infringement.

[1] https://github.com/storytold

I don't think it is better than just doing it yourself in Claude Code (in fact worse) but some people like cute UI for everything I guess.

I mean to be fair right under it they give you the command if you want to run it on your own. But yeah

You're right it's much safer to click next > next > next > next > finish.

I have CVP with the new program (including mythos access) and still get constant denials for silly situations. Most recently I fed a URL to my agent from a security blog and asked if to add it to my obsidian vault with appropriate tags-- cyber flagged. You're not missing much. OpenAI and/or most Chinese models are much more lax in their restrictions.

This kills the talent pipeline, and it'll create a spam problem for the CVE folks because now people will try to github PR spam their way to getting on a CVE.

It's worth talking about the fact that you can't even talk about DMCA to a model trained on the Library of Congress unless you're one of the approved people. And that's before reverse engineering something or writing code.

So in this future, it sucks to be you if you're someone trying to make your small app more secure, someone trying to upskill, a tinkerer trying to bypass corporate lockdowns for a device they own (a recognized DMCA exception, btw), a teenager trying to learn about security...

It locks away much of the richness that produced hacker culture behind glass. You can look at their press announcements and PR pieces, but you can't touch.

And as they're lobbying the government for "sensible regulation," this inevitably leads to a future where computing is controlled.

It's the direction their existing reports are taking. They recently released one in September that talked about how they stopped "bioweapons." What were said bioweapons efforts? Oh, it was scientists using Claude for grant writing, paperwork and grammar. At national labs.

These people are basically proud of impeding real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651727

And this is being used to lobby against "dangerous" open-weight models because gasp a scientist might use them to write a grant! To make better antidepressants.

At what point do they start reporting someone taking apart an iPhone and trying to DIY a repair with a schematic as a thwarted "cyber security incident?"

Are you feeling the "Safety?"