More than 28,000 stars in 12 days. Craft Anything went up on GitHub on October 31, 2026, and by November 12 it had passed 28,300 stars and 5,700 forks, one of the fastest climbs among repositories created in recent weeks. Its pitch is ambitious: study how any website, app or game works, then have a coding agent build your own version.
What it is
Under the pitch sits something more interesting than "clone anything": a reverse-engineering engine written entirely in Rust with 320 tools (300 in the engine, the rest in the AI and setup layers). It ships its own decoders, disassembler and decompiler, and covers native binaries, .NET, Java, Android, Apple, Electron/JavaScript, websites, firmware, packet captures, databases and game files. If Ghidra is installed, it uses that too.
On top of the engine, the workflow has four steps:
- Study the original: the site at several screen widths, its code, its files, how it runs.
- Build: a coding agent creates a new project in the language or engine you ask for.
- Check: it compares the result with the original (websites at three screen widths) and lists what doesn't match yet.
- Ready: open the result or ask for changes and it iterates again.
There are two modes. Clean room, the default, reads nothing inside the original: it works from what a visitor sees (screenshots, visible text, measured layout, colors, fonts) and from images you add. Deep uses every tool, including reading the code and the site's JavaScript, and is meant for private use.
The builder is your own claude (Claude Code), with your own sign-in; a Codex adapter exists but, per the README, hasn't been verified on a real install yet, and Copilot CLI works through ACP. It is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, your choice.
How to use it
The releases page has installers for Windows, macOS, Linux (AppImage, Flatpak, deb, rpm) and FreeBSD, signed and, on macOS, notarized. Building it yourself needs Rust 1.97 or newer:
git clone https://github.com/storytold/craft-anything && cd craft-anything
cargo install --path apps/craft-anything-cli
craft-anything-cli doctor # checks coding agents and enginesFor an engineer, the useful part isn't the desktop app but the fact that every tool is both a CLI subcommand and an MCP tool:
craft-anything-cli commands # every tool, by toolset
craft-anything-cli mcp # serve them to any MCP client
craft-anything-cli rebuild https://example.com "Recreate this website"Results come back as evidence records with confidence, coverage and limitations, and large ones are summarized and paged, which is designed to keep an agent's context from overflowing.
One warning from the README itself: when the agent installs the generated project's dependencies, those commands run on your machine, and packages can run code while they install. Craft Anything asks the first time it sees a kind of command, but if you pick "always allow" for npm, every later npm command runs without asking.
What I like and what I don't
I like the engine. A disassembler, decompiler and format parsers exposed as MCP tools, with evidence and confidence attached, is exactly what an agent needs to answer "what does this binary do?" without making things up. For an SRE who has to understand a legacy executable with no source, or an undocumented file format, that part is worth it on its own, without building anything.
I'm less sold on maturity. The project calls itself early alpha: building with API keys or other agents is "built, not yet run live", behavior checks for apps and games are partial, and some tools have only been tested against stand-ins. Twelve days old with more than 300 open issues and PRs fits that description.
And there is a caveat that isn't technical. Clean room is a rule about which tools it offers, not system isolation: the README says plainly that the agent acts as you. Being able to recreate a website or a game also doesn't mean you're allowed to. The project asks you to use it only on software you own or are permitted to examine; that responsibility is yours, not the tool's.
Craft Anything vs Ghidra
Ghidra is the reference reverse-engineering tool, open-sourced by the NSA and close to 100,000 stars on GitHub.
| Craft Anything | Ghidra | |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Study a target and rebuild it with a coding agent | Hands-on binary analysis: disassembly, decompilation, scripting |
| Interface | Desktop app, CLI and MCP server with 320 tools | Desktop application and scripting API |
| Language | Rust | Java |
| License | MIT or Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Maturity | Early alpha, published October 31, 2026 | On GitHub since 2019 |
When to use which. For deep analysis of a binary, with fine-grained control and years of plugins and docs behind it, Ghidra is still the pick, and Craft Anything uses it when it's installed. Craft Anything makes sense when you want an agent to do the exploring for you over MCP, or when the target isn't a binary but a website or app you want to understand end to end.
Sources
- storytold/craft-anything (GitHub, 2026-10-31)
- Craft Anything README (GitHub)
- NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra (GitHub)