r/learnprogramming • u/Curious-Tune-7127 • 2d 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/Digital-Chupacabra 2d ago
First off I would highly recommend watching some of Nathan Baggs's videos. He does reverse engineering and patching of video games and gets into a lot of technical detail without bogging it down.
If you have the source code you don't need to reverse engineer it.
Yes, and more. You can use a decompiler or a tool like ghidra to turn an application into readable code, it's not going to be what was originally written and it might not even be in the same language but it should be functionally close.
From there, you can do network and stack inspection, basically see how the application works, run the compiled code with a debugger so you can see what functions call what.
Using AI is largely having an AI do that for you, it can generally do it quicker. But if you look at the recently released Reverse engineered adobe products you can quickly see the limits of this.