I keep thinking about how many good ideas we leave behind just because somebody else got there first. You see something online and think, “I wish I had this.” Then you look at the price, the complicated setup, or the amount of work it probably took to create. And you move on. I wouldn’t be so quick to move on anymore. Something has changed, and I think it’s worth paying attention to.
That expensive little thing you really wanted
Imagine finding a beautiful website that lets you compare two photographs by moving a small slider. Or a language-learning app that somehow knows which words you’re about to forget. Or a small business with such a clever way of selling its services that you wish you could do something similar.
There is a lot of work behind these things. Good design, careful decisions, testing, and sometimes years of improvements.
But you don’t necessarily need to build everything behind them.
You may only want that photo comparison feature. That way of remembering difficult words. Or the simple process that makes a business work so well.
And this is where the newer AI tools are becoming incredibly interesting.
You can now study how a successful feature behaves, ask AI to explain the important parts, and build your own version from what you learn.
There is even a free open-source project called Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) that lets AI agents investigate how software works. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of GitHub stars.
And REA is only one part of this. With today’s AI coding tools, browser tools, and agents, there is a much simpler way to start.
Below, I will show you how to use it, what to copy as an idea, what you should never copy, and how to make something genuinely useful without paying for a whole software product.
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