alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered

What it is — A curated index of 16,844 open-source tools built by reverse engineering a closed product. The products covered include apps, APIs, devices, protocols, file formats, games, and AI products. The slogan is: "Don't reverse engineer it twice."

What problem it solves — Before you spend hours tearing apart some proprietary app, API, device, or file format, you can check whether someone has already done that work and published it. This list gathers those projects into one searchable place so you can reuse, fix, or extend existing work instead of starting from scratch.

How it works — Research agents scan GitHub, Hacker News, Reddit, and web searches (3,099 searches total), import existing lists (348 collections), and filter for interoperability and preservation projects only. Each candidate is checked against the GitHub API (existence, canonical URL, stars, license). A nightly GitHub Action refreshes the data — stars, archived status, dead links.

What's inside —

• 16,844 projects, 11.1M GitHub stars combined
• Activity breakdown: 9,730 active, 2,379 slowing, 3,231 dormant, 1,046 archived
• Top languages: Python (3,796), C++ (2,612), C (2,507), JavaScript (987), C# (902)
• 20 categories, largest being Game Decompilations & Reimplementations (6,098), Devices/IoT & Hardware (3,060), and RE Tooling (1,031)
• Well-known examples: yt-dlp, FFmpeg, Ghidra, jadx, vaultwarden, openpilot

How you use it — Three ways:

1. Web search at the project website — filter by category, language, and health; sort by stars or recent activity; shareable links.
2. AI agent skill — install with npx skills add alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered so an AI agent can search the index, rank by stars/activity/license, and pick the right tool for tasks that involve unofficial APIs. Also available as a Claude Code plugin, an MCP server, or a standalone Python script.
3. Add your own project if it isn't in the list, so the next person starts where you stopped.

Health status — Each project is marked 🟢 active (pushed within 12 months), 🟡 slowing (1–3 years), 🔴 dormant (3+ years), 🗄️ archived by owner, or ⚪ unknown (not on GitHub). The README warns that unofficial APIs break when vendors change their side, so check health before depending on a project.

Scope — what's included and excluded —

• Included: unofficial clients and SDKs, open drivers, local-control libraries, file-format parsers, protocol documentation, reimplementations, decompilations. The README notes reverse engineering for interoperability is protected in places like 17 U.S.C. §1201(f) and Article 6 of the EU Software Directive.
• Excluded on purpose: exploits and jailbreaks, security or certificate-pinning bypasses, decryption tools, cheats, DRM or paywall removal, CAPTCHA solvers, account bots. 173 repos were dropped by this filter.

License — MIT for code + CC0 for data.

Notable caveat from the README — Some projects are "clean-room" rewrites after a source leak (e.g., claw-code, PhotoCraft) and some collect leaked system prompts from AI tools (e.g., system_prompts_leaks, CL4R1T4S). The list includes these as they fit the defined scope of reverse-engineered artifacts.