So Here’s My Obligatory Reverse Engineer Anything Article

Fernando Pérez was talking about disposable consumer goods in a keynote this week. I’m at USRSE’26 in San Jose, with roughly 250 research software engineers, and his comparison keeps bringing me back to an awkward question: what happens when a program is finished for the person who made it, but someone else is just getting started with it?

Pérez, the creator of IPython and a co-founder of Jupyter, was talking about the enthusiasm for disposable things and the waste that followed. Software can have an afterlife too. Something its creator has finished with can become something another person depends on.

Meanwhile, the internet is having a wonderful time recreating software. Reverse Engineer Anything, or REA, connects coding agents to tools for investigating existing programs. ArtCraft and game-modding projects are part of the wider conversation, with demonstrations of applications and game worlds being taken apart and recombined.

I enjoy this stuff. There is something wonderfully unreasonable about seeing what people decide to build once a difficult technical obstacle starts getting smaller. But I’ve been thinking about it alongside the conversations here: AI versus RSEs, AI working with RSEs, abandoned projects, and who deals with the technical debt after the person who wrote the software moves…