Yes — with reverse engineering tools, virtually every app in the world is now effectively open source whether it wants to be or not, though the practical quality of results is still limited (Artcraft's apps are currently nearly unusable).
Apify MCP Server is an MCP server from Apify that lets AI assistants use Apify Actors as tools for web search, data extraction, scraping, browsing, and automation. Its hosted endpoint at mcp.apify.com supports Streamable HTTP and OAuth, while a local stdio distribution is available through the @apify/actors-mcp-server package. The server dynamically discovers Actors from the Apify Store, loads their input schemas, runs them, and exposes results through Apify datasets and key-value stores. It also provides tools for searching Apify documentation, inspecting and managing Actor runs, tasks, schedules, builds, and source files. Tool selection can be restricted through URL parameters or CLI flags, and the server supports agentic payment mechanisms including AGI, direct x402, and Skyfire.
Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, positioned as 'The AI for Problem Solvers'. It is a general-purpose AI system used for tasks such as generating code prompts, refining requirements, creating advertising strategy and copy, and processing creative content like storyboarding and video prompts.
Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment used to run server-side and other JavaScript applications. The videos describe it as a common runtime and application stack for web applications, including full-stack TypeScript projects, while the official project repository documents Current, Long Term Support (LTS), and nightly release channels. The project uses an open governance model and is supported by the OpenJS Foundation; it is distributed under the MIT license.
Reverse Engineer Anything is an AI-agent workflow that decompiles native binaries, including ELF and PE files, JVM bytecode, firmware, and container layers, into human-readable pseudo-code.
Rust is a systems programming language and toolchain developed by the Rust project. Its compiler, standard library, documentation, package manager and build tool Cargo, formatter rustfmt, linter Clippy, and editor support are maintained in the main repository. The language uses a rich type system and ownership model to enforce memory and thread safety at compile time, while targeting fast, memory-efficient software for critical services, embedded devices, and integration with other languages. Rust is primarily distributed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses, with portions under BSD-like licenses.
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00:00 Last week, a developer got so tired of Adobe's predatory business model that he decided to rebuild seven of its Creative Cloud apps with Rust, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. It then open sourced them and gave them away for free. The project is called Artcraft, and the developer's name is Brandon Thomas, who after being hit with Adobe's cancellation fee more than once, opened up Claude, then reverse engineered Adobe's 30 plus year codebase from scratch, and the apps even run on Linux, a platform Adobe is
00:26 never officially supported. What's crazy though is that you, the human being watching this video, can do the same thing thanks to an unrelated project called Reverse Engineer Anything. It's been going viral on the internet lately because it can easily decompile any native binaries you can get your hands on. We're talking stripped ELF PE and MCCO executables, JVM bite code with obuscated constant pools, ECMA 335 compliant assemblies, bare metal firmware with architecture specific instruction sets, and even OCI container
00:54 layers entangled in declarative infrastructure manifests. In layman's terms, that means virtually every app in the world is now open source, whether it wants to be or not. In today's video, we'll attempt to reverse engineer anything and everything and find out if this is the final nail in the coffin for software as we know it. It is October 12th, 2026, and you're watching the code report.
01:13 So, is it really true that one person plus Claude made the entire Adobe suite obsolete overnight? Well, on the surface, yes. As you can see on the website, you can download a Rustbased version of any Adobe program for free right now. That's awesome. But after trying it out myself, I realized there's one small catch. The software is a nearly unusable pile of vibecoded horseshit.
01:33 Now, I begrudgingly pay Adobe at $69 tribute every month to use Premiere to edit these videos for you guys. And I was thrilled to finally see an open- source alternative. And let's just ignore the fact that Da Vinci Resolve has been an open source alternative for over 20 years now. And when I first opened FilmCraft, I was thrilled to see that the UI was nearly a onetoone clone of Premiere so I could get to work immediately without any learning curve.
01:54 My plan was to edit this video with it, but the cracks became visible immediately. Like after dragging a clip of some lame stock video onto the timeline and hitting play, there was a massive lag in the audio bars and just overall slowness and laggginess despite being viodated in Rust, which I've been told is a blazingly fast programming language. So then I tried implementing some transitions between clips and they were just nowhere near the quality of Premiere, which you can clearly see with this glitch transition side
02:19 by side. And for someone like me who's a once- in a generation cinematic visionary who many have called the Stanley Kubri of sponsored chip posts that the sad reality is that filmcraft is just not good enough yet. But I sincerely hope it gets there someday because Adobe. But then that got me thinking what if instead of trying to use off-brand Premiere I just reverse engineer it myself and make it simpler because Premiere has hundreds of features that I don't use that just get in the way.
02:45 Luckily there's a new project in town that can help us do that called reverse engineer Anything. Adobe Premiere is primarily written in C and C++ and crazy smart Asians on H1B visas have been writing its code for decades now. Its actual source code is top secret Adobe intellectual property. But in order to actually run it on your machine, they need to compile that code into a native binary of ones and zeros.
03:05 This stuff is almost unreadable to humans, but with a lot of painstaking work, it is technically possible to map these ones and zeros back into something that resembles human readable source code. and the REA project can do that for people who can't even count to three in binary. First, we set it up by running it with Node.js and the MPX command. And then because I'm a loser on Microsoft Windows, we'll configure REA's GEDra integration, which is actually the tool that deserves the most credit here and can do a readonly
03:32 analysis of native .exees and DLS. Then from there, we can just use it like any other AI agent, and tell it to inspect the locally installed version of Adobe Premiere. In this case, I'll have it inspect Adobe's timeline integration and try to figure out how it does this one specific feature. A while later, we get back a bunch of sealike pseudo code along with assembly, strings, symbols, calls, and references, which to an obsolete HTML programmer is all pretty useless.
03:57 However, we can now take this garbage code and pass it off to our favorite coding agent to reimplement the exact same feature in Rust. And thanks to reverse engineering, I'll eventually be able to build my own version of Premiere Light that's not only free, but only has the actual features I want to use. But as a CheapKate developer, I'm not stopping there.
04:15 I think it's crazy that any real Vibe developer in 2026 is still paying money for developer tools when that money should be spent burning tokens. For example, let's take a look at an ancient technology called Supabase, which is basically a wrapper on top of AWS that provides a UI for your database. Even though it's mostly open- source, it has a ton of features I don't want.
04:35 So, what I'm doing instead is using the networking feature in Rea to analyze API interactions and UI changes, which has allowed me to build a better backend that I'm calling Studbase, which is not only perfectly tailored to the needs of Horse Tinder and Donker, but is also orders of magnitude cheaper and faster according to this benchmark I just made up.
04:53 Trust me, bro, you can trust these Trust Me Bro benchmarks. And another thing you can trust is Apify, the sponsor of today's video. Their MCP server lets you connect your agent to thousands of tools called actors. They can do things like scrape live data from YouTube or monitor your competitor's prices on Amazon. But right now, I'm using it to track the most liked posts on the donkeys of Instagram hashtag is so I can invite the most desirable asses to sign up on Donker.
05:18 It only takes one line to connect to the server and I could explain what I wanted it to do in natural language. From there, my agent started using the relevant Appify tools to return to the structured data I needed in order to help these gay donkeys find love. But the most impressive part was how few tokens it took. But because Appify's MCP server only exposes a handful of core tools, it then finds the best one for your job and runs it in the background to avoid token bloat.
05:44 You get $25 in free credits to try it out by using the code fire ship 25 at the link below. This has been the code report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.