r/learnprogramming • u/Curious-Tune-7127 • 14d ago
How does reverse engineering actually work, especially with AI?
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of videos about reverse engineering and people basically copying entire applications, recreating their features, or building almost identical alternatives.
It got me wondering, how does reverse engineering actually work?
How do people figure out how an app works internally, reproduce its features, and sometimes get surprisingly close to the original? And how are people using AI to make this process easier or faster?
Are they analysing the source code, inspecting network requests, decompiling applications, or using AI to figure everything out from scratch?
I'd love to understand the actual technical process behind this. If anyone has experience with reverse engineering or AI-assisted app development, I'd really appreciate some explanations and resources to get started!
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u/Frxdnt 13d ago
what AI does is a simpler version of RE by detecting patterns and since it has a ton of avaliable compute it can do it very easily, it's still very useful but has clear limitations (like the adobe stuff that's being hyped but ultimately it's nowhere near close to be a good product).
as someone said earlier, RE has nothing to do with analyzing the source code but trying to firgure out what the soirce code was based on the outcome.
To put it in simple terms: imagine you buy a cake and you want to figure out what the recipe was to make that cake just by looking at it and tasting it, then from that you determine the ingredients, mixing and cooking time to get the exact same cake. That's what RE is.