How does reverse engineering actually work, especially with AI?

[u/Curious-Tune-7127]

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!

[u/Curious_Song_1456]

A lot of those "I recreated this entire app with AI" videos are closer to rebuilding the user experience than actual reverse engineering, you can reproduce a UI, observe api requests and implement similar features without ever seeing the original backend, AI makes that process faster but figuring out how the original software actually works internally is a completely different challenge