An Agent Reverse-Engineering Tool Leads; Six Rust Clones of Adobe and Office Apps Follow

Two stories run through this board, and they are the same story told from opposite ends. At the top is a tool for pointing a coding agent at software you did not write and asking it how that software works. Below it are seven projects from one small studio, six of them copies of professional applications — Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, Acrobat, Illustrator, Word — that coverage says were written largely by coding agents from public specifications. In one week, then: agents reading closed software, and agents rewriting it in the open. Both drew the loudest argument of the week on the same question, which is whether what comes out is a copy. The board cannot settle that; it can only say how many people wanted to look. It does settle the question we left open last time. Strata, which we called the only newcomer still speeding up at the close, was the first thing to check, and it had already turned.

#1 morluto/rea — an agent-driven reverse engineering framework for analyzing app behavior and native binaries

+101,495 stars this week → 103,463 · rea star curve

2026-W41: +1,553 · up from the last issue · Earlier: 402 stars on 2026-09-14

Last issue this repository sat on our breakout board, and for two weeks before that its readings had barely moved — a handful of stars a day. Then it began to climb, and every day of this window was larger than the one before it, right up to the close. That is not a launch decaying; it is a curve that had not found its top when the window shut, and the readings since say it is still going. What REA does is narrow and not new: it gives an agent like Claude Code, Codex or Cursor one local MCP server that drives the tools reverse engineers already use — Ghidra, IDA, Hopper — and extends the same reach to Android packages, Electron apps and firmware. The pitch that spread was the bolder one in its own write-ups: let your agent reverse-engineer the feature you wish your app had. That framing is also where the pushback landed. Commenters called it a way of washing intellectual property, one report says a company has banned it internally, and critics pointed out that “local” stops at the decompiler: for the agent to reason about a binary, the decompiled code goes to whichever model provider it calls. The README itself is careful not to promise recovered source or automatic clones. Whether the audience is curious or cloning, the board cannot tell. What it can say next issue is whether this curve has found its top.

#2 storytold/photocraft — an open-source Rust reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop with native PSD support and AI-agent compatibility

+45,314 stars over 5.8 days → 47,524 · photocraft star curve

Seven rows on this board belong to one GitHub organisation, storytold, and the useful thing to say about them is what they share. Six are clean-room copies of commercial applications — this one of Photoshop, the others of Lightroom, Premiere, Acrobat, Illustrator and Word — from the team behind ArtCraft, the AI image IDE in the row below. Most were announced together on Hacker News just as the window opened, with the Office copies following later in the week. The author, Brandon Thomas, was unusually blunt in that thread that the apps are nowhere near ready, and hands-on reviews agree: the surface is recognisable, the depth is not there yet. Coverage reports that much of the code was written by coding agents working from published specifications, and each repository states that it contains no Adobe code, icons or presets. The curves tell one story six times over: a large second or third day, then every day smaller than the last. That is what a single announcement looks like when it is split across several repositories. The seventh row is the interesting one. ArtCraft is older, had been almost motionless for two weeks, and started climbing the moment its siblings appeared — attention spilling from the new apps onto the studio’s existing one. The test for the suite is the same as for any launch: whether any of the copies keeps growing once the announcement is a week old.

#3 storytold/artcraft — an IDE for interactive AI image and video creation with precise 2D and 3D scene staging

+15,377 stars over 6.2 days → 17,821 · artcraft star curve

Earlier: 2,096 stars on 2026-09-13

#4 Niko1221/Strata — a local inference engine for running 125B parameter models on consumer gaming PCs

+10,608 stars this week → 21,574 · Strata star curve

2026-W41: +10,436 · much the same as last week · Earlier: 530 stars on 2026-09-28

Last issue we called this the only newcomer still speeding up at the close, and the shape to check first. It turned almost as we wrote it. The first day of this window was its biggest ever, and from there each day added less than the one before, give or take, until by the close it was gaining at roughly a third of that peak. The weekly total matches its launch week only because the opening days carried the momentum of the last; inside the week, the shape is a slowdown, not a plateau. For the second issue running, a rising tail we pointed at stopped rising almost on publication — Hindsight did the same last time — and the lesson is that a curve still climbing at the close describes where a launch was, not where it is going. The project itself moved faster than its stars. A run of releases hardened its local server against cross-site attacks, added parallel requests and an OpenAI-style Responses endpoint so Codex can drive it, and claimed faster decoding with unchanged output. The caveats from launch still stand: the weights are squeezed to two or three bits, testers report quality and vision trade-offs, and the speed figures are the author’s own.

#5 mattpocock/skills — a set of composable agent skills that apply engineering fundamentals to AI-assisted coding

+10,019 stars this week → 286,181 · skills star curve

2026-W41: +5,478 · up from the last issue, after a week away · Earlier: 260,477 stars on 2026-09-13

Last issue this row went out with no paragraph, which was the right call for a repository that adds nearly the same amount every day. This week it stopped doing that. For most of the window it ran at its usual pace; then, over the last few days, the daily gain roughly doubled and held there through the close — on the largest repository on the board, where doubling means a great many new readers. It follows a release rather than a launch. In early October Matt Pocock’s collection of agent skills shipped an update that lets a coding agent take a written spec, split it into tickets, and hand the unblocked tickets to several helper agents at once, with more commits through the following week. That is the idea Orca and the other orchestrators on recent boards sell as a product, delivered here as instructions you install into the agent you already use. It is too early to say whether the new pace is a release bump that will fade or a change in what people come to this repository for. The thing to check next issue is simple: whether the daily gain falls back to where it was, or stays where it ended.

#6 storytold/lightcraft — a high-performance open-source RAW photo editor and library manager built for AI agents

+9,679 stars over 5.8 days → 10,178 · lightcraft star curve

#7 storytold/filmcraft — an open-source Premiere Pro alternative in pure Rust with a command-driven engine for AI agents

+9,423 stars over 5.8 days → 10,076 · filmcraft star curve

#8 lexmount/moli — a resource-efficient headless browser for AI agents with on-demand visual rendering

+8,985 stars this week → 16,391 · moli star curve

Earlier: 1,964 stars on 2026-09-13

#9 Ebony-Vinyl/dsh-our-free-model — a zero-config plugin for DeepSeek Harness providing free unlimited access to frontier LLMs via a transparent gateway

+7,140 stars over 5.8 days → 8,875 · dsh-our-free-model star curve

This is the row to read carefully before installing anything. It is a plugin for DeepSeek Harness, the coding harness that has appeared in every issue of this list, and its promise is in its description: no login, no sign-up, no API key, frontier models simply appear in the model picker, free and uncapped. Its pace picked up toward the close rather than fading. What it actually does is route requests through someone else’s free tier. Third-party write-ups trace the models to a single public gateway — one names OpenCode’s Zen — and the model list follows whatever that upstream offers, which is why listings published days apart disagree about which models it serves. None of that is hidden, but “completely free, no usage cap” is a promise about a service the plugin’s author does not run. Two practical points follow. Prompts and code go to that gateway, not to the providers named in the picker. And a free tier that suddenly carries a large new audience is exactly the kind that gets rate-limited or closed. Forks and mirrors under other owners are already circulating, so anyone trying it should at least install the original.

#10 storytold/pdfcraft — a clean-room Rust reimplementation of Adobe Acrobat with native support for AI agents

+6,965 stars over 3.8 days → 9,604 · pdfcraft star curve

Breaking out

Ranked by growth relative to their own size, not by stars added. These are small enough that a week can multiply them — and small enough to have escaped you.

storytold/vectorcraft · +1344.1% over 5.8 days → 7,076 stars · vectorcraft star curve

Another Storytold project, VectorCraft is an open-source Adobe Illustrator alternative. It uses multithreaded SIMD rendering for high performance and includes an MCP server so AI agents can draw and edit vector graphics as a human would.

KingKongRobotics/jumper · +674.4% over 5.8 days → 2,385 stars · jumper star curve

This is an AI-powered toolkit for designing appearances, training motions, and creating scenes for a 22-DoF crab robot using natural language prompts.

omlahore/RemoveMacAI · +645.4% this week → 4,316 stars · RemoveMacAI star curve

Earlier: 579 stars on 2026-10-05

A utility for macOS 27 that disables Apple Intelligence features and removes their associated on-device models to reclaim disk space.

storytold/wordcraft · +555.6% over 2.8 days → 5,861 stars · wordcraft star curve

The final Storytold entry is WordCraft, a Rust-based reimplementation of Microsoft Word with .docx compatibility. It maps every user action to a command ID, making it agent-native via MCP. There is not enough history to judge the shape of its growth.

nullmoth/nvidia-macos-driver · +434.7% over 3.8 days → 2,529 stars · nvidia-macos-driver star curve

A Metal driver that enables NVIDIA Turing and later GPUs to run on macOS 15 Sequoia, providing hardware acceleration for the desktop and AI frameworks like Core ML.

Three things to check next issue. Whether REA has found its top or is still climbing. Whether any of the storytold copies keeps growing once its announcement is a week old — the first to do so is the one people are actually using. And whether skills holds its new pace or slips back, which will say whether a set of instructions can grow like a product.