A PhD student borrowed the name of a 430k-star project and got 1000 stars in 21 days: Awesome-REA's stars were manufactured
What it is A reverse-engineering awesome list plus a search site, awesomerea.org, riding on the popularity of the project REA (Reverse Engineer Anything). Agents batch-collected 1,196 curated entries and 3,309 index repos.
Why it blew up REA has 436k stars and gains another 27k a week, so people searching for REA resources spilled over. On the day it was created it slipped into REA's own author's list, then it opened PRs on dozens of listed projects to add badges. Add an org-account fork that takes up search, and the entry point stays open, which is why stars run flat at 60 a day.
BHow to apply it: Stop building REA lists. Take the playbook to the next open-source project that's blowing up and still has no ecosystem around it: claim an Awesome-<name> repo within a week, open PRs against the author's list on day one, use an agent to build the most complete version, then go after the badge from each project that gets listed. Skip the fork matrix.
- Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-10-16 · 1,479 stars · 7 days +763
GitHub · stars Data 2026-10-19 → 2026-11-08 (21 days, 20 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
Oct 2026 16 in the early morning, Yuxuan Zhang, a PhD student in computer science at UBC (known on GitHub as reacher-z), created a repo called Awesome-REA. REA is morluto/rea, "Reverse Engineer Anything," the reverse-engineering project that gained 436k stars in half a year and still gains 27k a week. That evening (Pacific time 21:00), a new line appeared in awesome-reverse-engineering, the list maintained by the REA author himself: "Awesome REA (reacher-z)," submitted by Awesome REA. Three weeks later the repo has 1,010 stars and 244 forks, and gains about 60 stars a day steadily. It is not the first list with this name, and not the only one doing heavy work. This piece covers how it broke out from a pile of same-named lists, and, if you want your own open-source project to get stars, what to copy and what to avoid.
What it is
A reverse-engineering "awesome list" with a companion search site, awesomerea.org. Content is organized into six sections: websites, games, apps, binaries, firmware/hardware, and communication protocols, plus a section on Agents and MCP. The badges on the first screen of the README read: 1,196 curated resources, 424 case studies, 207 papers, plus 3,309 index repos "found by README scanning, not yet reviewed." The most recent review date is 11-06.
What sets it apart from a typical awesome list is that it's a data pipeline. Each resource is tagged with its relationship to REA (Official REA / Community REA / Independent). It offers browse-by-task, case pages, a paper library, JSON/CSV endpoints, llms.txt, a Hugging Face dataset, and an AGENTS.md written for agents. Entries are mostly batch-collected by an agent pipeline: the repo's issue/PR numbering reached #2761 in 21 days, GitHub Actions scans every hour, and the author himself opens dozens of "Curate 249 repositories" PRs a day.
The third line of the README reads: "If this collection is useful, a star on GitHub helps others find it." Further down, the "Featured benchmarks" section on the first screen features WebsiteBench and ClawBench from TIGER-AI-Lab, projects from the author's own circle. The list itself also serves as a referral slot for the author's other projects.
How stars grew: a flat line, not a spike
| Date | Cumulative stars | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 10-16 | 0 | Created the repo; slipped into the REA author's list the same day |
| 10-19 | 36 | Already 102 forks, but only 36 stars |
| 10-24 | 253 | |
| 10-28 | 518 | Single-day peak +87 |
| 11-01 | 716 | |
| 11-06 | 1,010 | Last 7 days +414, first 7 days +455 |
(Daily GitHub snapshot, 11-06.)
Between 40 and 90 stars a day, with no single day of sudden surge. This is a completely different shape from a repo that took off on one tweet or one video, which peaks the next day and then halves every day after. A flat line means there are several passive entry points that stay open, not a one-time event. It can't be found on X after 30 days, not on Hacker News, and no media has written about it.
Launched later than the same-name lists; why it won
Within two weeks after REA took off, a large crop of "awesome-rea" lists appeared:
| Name | Repo created | Stars (11-06) | Trait |
|---|---|---|---|
| morluto/awesome-reverse-engineering | 10-09 | 1,862 | Maintained by the REA author himself, tools-focused; links to Awesome-REA |
| SubmitGame/awesome-decomp-games | 10-09 | 2,898 | Games decompilation only, with ratings |
| alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered | 10-11 | 1,253 | Claims 17k+ projects, search site + MCP, closest in form |
| kaixinbaba/awesome-rea + awesomerea.com | 10-12 | 21 | Same name, older, 159 entries, no operations |
| songshikang0111/awesome-REA-cases | 10-12 | 399 | Case studies only |
| AIshihzong/awesome-reverse-engineer-anything | 10-13 | 503 | Hand-curated bilingual, emphasizes which projects actually use REA |
| yibie/awesome-rea | 10-13 | 264 | Small list on AI-assisted decompilation |
| reacher-z/Awesome-REA | 10-16 | 1,010 | |
| wtsxDev/reverse-engineering (long-standing) | 2017 | 10,759 | No updates in 2023 years |
Awesome-REA launched 3 to 4 days after several of the same-name lists. The most telling is the kaixinbaba one: same name, nearly the same domain (awesomerea.com vs. awesomerea.org), and older. It's listed on REA's official list just one line above reacher-z's, yet has only 21 stars. The difference isn't the name; it's the five things below.
Five entry points, each visible
1. The name is anchored to REA. The repo name, topics (rea, mcp, agent-skills, ghidra), and site name are all REA. Every resource is tagged again with its relationship to REA. Anyone searching "what can REA be used for" finds it. GitHub's reverse-engineer-anything topic page, SkillsLLM, Trendshift, and aggregators like githubsignals all index it.
2. It got into the official list. On the day the repo was created, it submitted that one line to REA's author's list, and it was merged. The official list itself has 1,800 more stars and gains dozens a day, a referral link that never closes.
3. It sent badge PRs to the projects it listed. Over three weeks, reacher-z opened more than 1,000 PRs outward (the ceiling of GitHub's search API). About 40 of them had titles like "docs: add awesome rea feature badge" or "Add Awesome REA collection badge," sent to projects it had listed, such as frida-mcp, pyghidra-mcp, mcp-windbg, binary_ninja_mcp, and Wireshark-MCP. Most listed project authors were happy to add a "Featured by Awesome REA" line, so each project page became another entry point for it.
4. A matrix of org-account forks. About 135 of the 244 forks came from 10 org accounts (ai4-research, ReacherLab, WebsiteBench, AwesomeCUA, Awesome-REA, and others). Each account forked the repo 5 to 17 times, renamed it Awesome-REA-Binary, -Firmware, -Web, -Mobile, -Games, and so on, and took up GitHub search keywords. The org account named Awesome-REA was registered 11 minutes after the repo was created. There's no direct evidence that the author controls these accounts, but the names line up one-to-one with his other projects (inference, high confidence). This also explains the odd ratio on 10-19 of "102 forks, 36 stars" that day: the 24% fork-to-star ratio in the data doesn't reflect high user engagement.
5. Data volume. The same-name lists are all hand-curated, with a few hundred entries or fewer. This one collects hourly through an agent pipeline, so one person achieved a scale a team curating by hand couldn't keep up with. That made it "the most complete one," and the official list was more willing to accept it.
Whether the stars come from real people can't be verified externally (GitHub's stargazer API returned no data this time), so it's marked unverified.
But the foundation is REA's heat
Two comparisons show where the ceiling is.
Awesome-CUA, created the same day by the same author (computer-use agents, also a hot keyword), used the same playbook and reached 490 stars by 11-06, with the same curve shape. His earlier AI-Can-What, which attached to no hot IP, has 1 stars.
alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered is just as heavy (17k entries, a search site, MCP) and doesn't carry REA's name. It has 1,253 stars, about the same as this one. So in this lane, "heavy data" is the price of admission, not a unique edge. What actually amplifies is the name and the few outside entry points.
Awesome-REA's stars are roughly 0.2% of REA's. In the last 7 days, 414 was slightly below the prior 7 days' 455. REA is cooling off, so it will likely drop too.
If it were you
Verdict: worth a try, but don't do REA. Dozens of lists already orbit REA, and a new one won't reach this scale. What's worth copying is the playbook: ride a blowing-up IP, make the most complete list around it, then open up each entry point one by one, and apply that to the next IP.
Who it suits: developers who can build a batch-collection pipeline with agents; people already inside a technical circle who can spot which project is about to blow up; people who want stars and reputation and aren't counting on revenue.
Who it doesn't suit: people hoping to build a long-term body of work from one awesome list. Its lifespan follows the IP. Also not for those unwilling to PR dozens of projects one by one and maintain them daily, or hand-curating authors who can't compete on scale.
How to do it: watch GitHub for projects gaining tens of thousands of stars a week whose official surrounding resources aren't complete yet. Within a week, claim "Awesome-<IP name>." On day one, PR the IP author's list or README into Related. Use agents to collect daily and tag every entry with structured labels, then ship a search site, JSON endpoint, and llms.txt. Put "star this to help others find it" on the first screen of the README. Skip the fork-matrix trick; it risks being flagged as spam by GitHub.
How to get users: don't rely on social media. Rely on passive entry points: the IP author's list, badges on listed projects (PR after listing, then chase each one), GitHub topic pages, aggregators like Trendshift, and directory sites where you register yourself as an agent skill.
When to be early: within one to two weeks after the IP starts taking off. REA's repo was created in April, and surrounding lists only clustered in October. Awesome-REA still won by a few days because operations made up the gap. A month later, there's basically no room left (inference).
Signs you've misread it: the IP author rejects your PR or the README explicitly accepts only official ones; still single-digit stars a day after two weeks; or the IP's weekly star growth halves within a month, since a list's ceiling is the IP itself.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one morluto/awesome-reverse-engineering Open source 2026-10-09 1,862 stars REA author's official list, tools-focused; oddly it links to Awesome-REA SubmitGame/awesome-decomp-games Open source 2026-10-09 2,898 stars Games decompilation only, with ratings alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered Open source 2026-10-11 1,253 stars Closest in form: 17k+ projects, search site, skills+MCP; doesn't carry the REA name AIshihzong/awesome-reverse-engineer-anything Open source 2026-10-13 503 stars Hand-curated bilingual list, emphasizes which projects actually use REA, few entries songshikang0111/awesome-REA-cases Open source 2026-10-12 399 stars Case studies only yibie/awesome-rea Open source 2026-10-13 264 stars Small list on AI-assisted decompilation/recompilation kaixinbaba/awesome-rea + awesomerea.com Web 2026-10-12 21 stars, 159 reviews Same name and older, but small in scale and not operated wtsxDev/reverse-engineering Open source 2017-01 10,759 stars Long-standing reverse-engineering list, no updates in 2023 years, no AI agent / MCP content alphaSeclab/awesome-reverse-engineering Open source 2019-12 5,194 stars Old-timer, unmaintained 2021 years later - Where users come from
- Verified Riding the name (REA hype): library, topic and site names all lean on REA; REA is 436k stars, +27k in the last 7 days (github library); every resource is tagged with its relation to REA
- Verified Squeezed into the official list: morluto/awesome-reverse-engineering commit 18eca04 (2026-10-16, author email reacher-z) added Awesome-REA to Related
- Verified Badge / backlink outreach PRs: reacher-z opened 1,000+ outbound PRs to other repos, about 40 of which add a "Featured by Awesome REA" badge or link to the listed project (frida-mcp, pyghidra-mcp, mcp-windbg, etc.)
- Verified Org-account fork matrix: 10 linked org accounts produced about 135 forks, renamed with keywords like Awesome-REA-Binary / -Firmware / -Web; the Awesome-REA org account was registered 11 minutes after the repo was created
- Verified Aggregators / directories: Trendshift, githubsignals, rising-repo, SkillsLLM, the GitHub topic page reverse-engineer-anything
- Verified README star asks + machine-readable endpoints: the README's first screen says "star it to help others find it"; llms.txt, JSON API, HF dataset TIGER-Lab/awesome-rea
- Inferred X / HN / media: x-radar shows 30 posts in 0 days; no HN presence
reacher-z/Awesome-REA: why it took off
Channel: GitHub. Research day 2026-11-06. Sources: our github library (repo_profile / repo_day), live GitHub API, Jina search, x-radar, hackernews library.
One line
It's an awesome list for reverse engineering (with the awesomerea.org site), riding the wave of morluto/rea (REA, Reverse Engineer Anything, 436k stars): the name is Awesome-REA, pulling traffic from the REA ecosystem. It gets a steady ~60 stars a day from "name + being listed by the official maintainer + batch badge PRs to listed projects + org-account fork matrix + a huge number of entries maintained fully automatically by agents." The product itself is a heavily data-engineered awesome list, nothing new.
1. Data
- Created 2026-10-16, reached 1,010 stars by 11-06 (live GitHub check 1,049), 244 forks; +414 in the last 7 days, +455 in the first 7 days; single-day peak +87 (10-28). Curve: 10-19 36 stars → 10-24 253 → 10-28 518 → 11-06 1,010, 40–90 stars a day, very smooth, no single spike (github library repo_day).
- Author reacher-z = Yuxuan Zhang, a UBC CS PhD student, with ties to Waterloo's TIGER-AI-Lab (per the GitHub bio); 86 followers, no personal traffic.
- The sister repo reacher-z/Awesome-CUA (computer-use agents), created the same day, reached 11-06 490 stars with the same curve shape (github library). The author's earlier AI-Can-What (10-16) has only 1 stars, suggesting this playbook only works when you attach to a hot IP.
- The data card's claim that "fork/star 24% shows strong participation" is not valid: of the 245 forks, about 135 come from 10 linked org accounts (ai4-research, AI4AIResearch, ar-rsi, Awesome-REA, AwesomeCUA, AwesomeJev, FrontierAutoResearch, ReacherLab, WebsiteBench, longhorizonagents), each account forking 5–17 times and renaming the fork to keyword names like Awesome-REA-Binary / -Firmware / -Web / -Mobile / -Games / -Protocols / -Decompilation / -Static-Analysis. The
Awesome-REAorg account was registered 11 minutes after the repo was created. 10-17/18 two days in, 102 forks, yet only 36 stars (GitHub forks API). - Star sources can't be checked: the stargazers endpoint returned 404 this time, so whether stars were botted is unverified; our suspect list is empty.
2. Background: the REA wave
- morluto/rea was created 2026-04-14, now 436k stars, still +27k in the last 7 days (github library); featured in a Scientific American interview, Medium, Reddit, several YouTube videos (Jina search: scientificamerican.com, medium.com/data-science-collective, reddit r/claude, r/tech_x).
- The wave spawned a large set of REA satellite repos: REA-Prompts (3,635), leanrea (4,019), rea-cn (834), rea-video (1,971), etc. (github library). "REA" has become a keyword anyone can ride. REA's official README even warns that repos with similar names or copied READMEs are not official.
3. Competitors (awesome lists that appeared within two weeks of the REA hype, plus long-standing reverse-engineering lists)
| Name | Repo created | stars | How Awesome-REA differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| morluto/awesome-reverse-engineering (maintained by the REA author) | 10-09 | 1,862 | Official endorsement, tool-focused; its "Related" section links to Awesome-REA (commit 18eca04,10-16, author email reacher-z, meaning reacher-z's own PR was merged in) |
| SubmitGame/awesome-decomp-games | 10-09 | 2,898 | Game decompilation only, with ratings and auto-refresh |
| alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered | 10-11 | 1,253 | Claims 17k+ projects, search site + skill + MCP, refreshed nightly; closest in form |
| AIshihzong/awesome-reverse-engineer-anything | 10-13 | 503 | Emphasizes "which projects actually used REA", bilingual |
| songshikang0111/awesome-REA-cases | 10-12 | 399 | Case collection |
| yibie/awesome-rea | 10-13 | 264 | AI-assisted decompilation / recompilation |
| HaozheH3/awesome-rea-games | 10-16 | 105 | Games |
| kaixinbaba/awesome-rea + awesomerea.com | 10-12 | 21 | Same-name site, 159 entries |
| wtsxDev/reverse-engineering (long-standing) | 2017 | 10,759 | No updates for years (last push 2023-07) |
| alphaSeclab/awesome-reverse-engineering (long-standing) | 2019 | 5,194 | Unmaintained after 2021 |
| ReversingID/Awesome-Reversing (long-standing) | 2019 | 757 | Low-frequency maintenance |
(Star counts from the GitHub API / github library, 2026-11-06)
Bottom line: Awesome-REA is not the first, arriving 3–4 days after several same-name lists; it wins on later operations and data volume.
4. Growth tactics (with evidence)
- Riding the REA name: library name, topics (rea, mcp, agent-skills, ghidra) and site name all anchor on REA; each resource also carries labels like "Official REA / Community REA / Independent" describing its relation to REA, so people searching for REA material find it. The GitHub topic page "reverse-engineer-anything", SkillsLLM (listed as an agent skill), Trendshift, githubsignals and rising-repo all have pages for it (Jina search).
- Squeezed into the official list: on 10-16 the same day, a PR to morluto/awesome-reverse-engineering added itself to the Related section and was merged (commit above). The official list itself has 1,800+ stars and gains dozens a day, a steady referral source.
- Backlinks / badge outreach: reacher-z opened 1,000+ PRs to external repos (GitHub search API cap 1,000), about 40 of them titled "docs: add awesome rea feature badge", "Add Awesome REA collection badge", "docs: link the X entry in Awesome REA", sent to projects it had listed (frida-mcp, pyghidra-mcp, mcp-windbg, binary_ninja_mcp, Wireshark-MCP, user1342/Awesome-Android-Reverse-Engineering, etc.); 39 of them, 11 are closed (merged or rejected). Maintainers who accept the "Featured by Awesome REA" badge link back to it from their project pages.
- Org-account fork matrix: 10 linked org accounts produced 135 keyword-named forks, each fork page reading "forked from reacher-z/Awesome-REA", which also takes up GitHub search results. The same tactic was used for Awesome-CUA (Awesome-CUA-iOS / -Android / -Web ...).
- Data volume from full agent automation: the repo's issue/PR numbers reached #2761 in 21 days; GitHub Actions runs a README scan every hour, importing batches of "300 unreviewed discovery records"; reacher-z personally opens dozens of "Curate 249 repositories"-style PRs a day. Result: 1,196 curated entries + 424 case studies + 207 papers + 3,309 index repos, far more than comparable lists.
- Machine-readable + asking for stars: it provides llms.txt, llms-full.txt, a JSON/CSV API, a JSON Feed, and a Hugging Face dataset (TIGER-Lab/awesome-rea). The third line of the README says "star it to help others find it," and the author 11-06 also submitted a PR to WebsiteBench asking for a "star on the first screen" change. The author clearly knows how to run GitHub star growth.
- Not found: x-radar shows 0 results for "Awesome-REA / awesomerea / ReacherZhang" in 30 days; no HN presence; no media coverage found. Growth is not coming from social media or big accounts.
5. Why it took off
- Timing: REA is at 436k stars and adding 27k a week; lots of people are looking for "what REA can do, which cases and tools exist," and a list carrying the REA name caught the spillover. Awesome-REA's stars are roughly 0.2% of REA's.
- Distribution: listed by the REA author's own list + badges on listed projects + the fork matrix make a steady passive funnel, which is why the curve is a daily 60-star plateau rather than a one-time spike.
- Product: the data volume and structure (site search, REA-relation tagging, task-based lookup, case pages, paper library, API, llms.txt) is the heaviest in its category; the author is an agent-building PhD student who uses agent pipelines to produce entries in bulk, which is hard for others to match by hand.
6. Differentiation
Same-category lists (yibie, songshikang, AIshihzong, kaixinbaba) are all hand-curated and under a few hundred entries. Awesome-REA is different in three ways: ① scale (1,196 curated + 3,309 indexed, auto-ingested hourly); ② structure (each entry marks its relation to REA, with audit sources; includes a search site, an API, an HF dataset, and an AGENTS.md and llms.txt for agents); ③ operations (outreach PRs, a fork matrix, and getting into the official list). Is that why it took off? Partly. The differentiation made it "the most complete one" among a pile of same-named lists, and it made the official list willing to accept it, but the traffic base is REA's own heat; the amplification came from operations. The same playbook on AI-Can-What, with no hot IP behind it, got only 1 stars; Awesome-CUA (computer-use is also a buzzword) got 490. alexgaoth/awesome-reverse-engineered is just as heavy (17k entries, a search site, MCP) and has similar stars (1,253), which suggests that in this niche, heavy data is the entry ticket, not a unique edge.
7. Visibility
In small circles people are talking about it: it's included in REA's official maintainer list, and aggregator sites like Trendshift, githubsignals, rising-repo, and SkillsLLM have pages for it. No discussion found on X, HN, or media; revenue not involved.
8. Copycats
There are many awesome lists around REA, but most came earlier (yibie, songshikang, AIshihzong, and kaixinbaba were all in 10-12/13), so it's not a copy of it. Later ones: HaozheH3/awesome-rea-games (a bit later, 10-16 with 105 stars) and vvs1off/awesome-reverse-engineering (11-01,15 stars). The author copied the whole playbook onto Awesome-CUA.
9. What to borrow
- Find an open-source IP that is blowing up but whose official ecosystem of companion resources isn't complete, claim the name with "Awesome-<IP name>", then submit PRs to the IP author's list to get into Related.
- Batch-ingest with an agent pipeline, tag each entry with structured labels, and ship a website + API + llms.txt + HF dataset, turning "most complete" into a moat.
- Submit badge PRs to the projects you list to earn backlinks; ask for stars on the first screen of the README.
- The fork-matrix tactic of grabbing keywords risks being flagged as spam by GitHub; not recommended to copy.
- The ceiling is the IP's own heat: as REA cools, it cools too (the last 7 days gained 414, slightly below the prior 7 days' 455).
10. Uncertain
- Stargazers API 404; whether the stars come from real people or were inflated was not verified.
- Whether those 10 org accounts are controlled by the author: strongly suspected (the names match one-to-one with the author's other projects WebsiteBench / ReacherLab / AwesomeCUA, and the Awesome-REA org account was registered 11 minutes after the repo was created), but there is no direct evidence.
- How much traffic each source contributes (official list vs. badges vs. GitHub search vs. aggregator sites) is unknown; who published the "Awesome REA list" on Fazier was not verified.