I Tested the Viral Reverse Engineering Repo (What You Need to Know)
Jack Roberts clones three billion-dollar SaaS tools, Calendly, Typeform, and Trello, inside Base44 using nothing but screenshots and prompts, to find out what REA actually replaces.
Posted
yesterday
Duration
Format
Demo
hype
Views
18.4K
303 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
An AI method called REA can watch any app's screens, logic, and data and rebuild a working clone from one screenshot and a prompt, which turns 'can I copy this?' into 'is it worth my time to?'
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You're paying $20-$200+ a month for tools like Calendly, Typeform, or Trello and wonder if AI could replace them.
You want a real, step-by-step example of turning a screenshot and one prompt into a working app with login, database, and bookings.
You're deciding whether to build your own internal tools instead of subscribing to more SaaS.
SKIP IF…
You're looking for a line-by-line coding tutorial. This is prompt-and-click, not a code walkthrough.
You just want the REA prompt itself without watching a full build demo. Grab it from the description links instead.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Jack Roberts tests Reverse Engineer Anything (REA), a viral method for having AI watch any app's UI, logic, and data and rebuild it, by cloning three billion-dollar tools, Calendly, Typeform, and Trello, inside Base44 using one screenshot and one prompt each time. Each clone lands around 80% functional on the first try: real logins, databases, bookings, forms, and shareable boards, with follow-up prompts filling the gaps. REA's repo is 422,000 lines of code, but the actual method is a 789-line prompt, so nothing needs installing. The hard rule throughout: never copy code, images, or logos, only the functionality, then rebuild it with your own brand.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Cold open: AI can now reverse-engineer and clone any app in minutes, setting up the premise for the whole video.
00:52 – 01:27
02 · How Reverse Engineering Works
REA checks out an app's UI, then its logic, then its underlying data, and uses all three to recreate the app.
01:27 – 01:48
03 · The Three Apps I'm Testing
Names the three billion-dollar targets for the test: Calendly ($3B), Typeform ($935M), and Trello ($425M).
01:48 – 02:20
04 · The Viral Repo vs the Useful Part
REA's repo is 422,000 lines of code, but the actual reverse-engineering method is a 789-line prompt you don't need to install anything to use.
02:20 – 03:24
05 · Building a Booking App
Feeds Base44 a Calendly screenshot plus one prompt asking it to recreate the booking system; Base44 builds the backend, login, and UI.
03:24 – 05:20
06 · Testing the Booking Flow
Signs in with Google, sets working days and a 15-minute meeting link, books a real slot, and gets an automatic confirmation email, fully functional on the first try.
05:20 – 07:10
07 · Adding Missing Features
The first build has no way to edit a booking; one more prompt adds an edit button, emoji, and custom questions, and the live link updates instantly.
07:10 – 08:36
08 · Building a Form App
Repeats the process on Typeform, screenshotting the real site and prompting Base44 to build "Ask," a renamed form builder with the same core functionality.
08:36 – 10:35
09 · Testing Forms and Results
Builds a multi-question coffee survey (multiple choice, short text, rating), publishes a shareable link, submits a response, and watches results populate live.
10:35 – 12:28
10 · What One Prompt Still Misses
The one-shot build nails roughly 80% of the real product's functionality but lacks design polish, mobile optimization, and a preview mode until he asks for them.
12:28 – 13:58
11 · Building a Trello-Style Board
Final test clones Trello into "Lanes," a draggable board with cards, checklists, and covers, built from the same screenshot-plus-prompt workflow.
13:58 – 14:40
12 · Testing Team Invites
Inviting a teammate by email sends a real invite, and the second account can log in and see the shared board immediately, multiplayer works out of the box.
14:40 – 15:10
13 · What You Shouldn't Copy
States the ethical line: never copy their code, their images, or their logo, only the functionality, rebuilt with your own brand.
15:10 – 16:30
14 · When to Build vs Buy
Whether building your own version beats paying for it depends on how complex the tool is to replace and how much your own time is worth; there's a real cost crossover point.
16:30 – 16:46
15 · Make the App Your Own
Closing thesis: software isn't dead, copying functionality just got cheap, so the differentiator becomes your own design and brand.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
REA's GitHub repo is 422,000 lines of code, but the actual reverse-engineering technique is a single 789-line prompt, the rest is scaffolding you don't need.
The average person spends $219 a month on software subscriptions, or roughly $2,628 a year.
A single screenshot plus one prompt was enough for Base44 to rebuild a working Calendly clone with login, availability settings, and a real booking confirmation email.
The first-shot clone of each app hit about 80% of the real product's functionality, missing mainly design polish and edge-case features.
Base44 auto-configures the backend, database, and email notifications, so the builder never has to think about the plumbing.
Inviting a teammate to the Trello clone sent a real email invite, and the second account could log into the shared board immediately.
The dividing line for ethical cloning: copy what a tool does, never its code, its images, or its logo.
Whether building your own version of a tool beats paying for it depends on two factors: how complex the tool is to replace, and how much your own time is worth.
There's a real cost crossover point: subscription cost rises in a straight line while a one-time build cost stays flat, so building gets cheaper the longer you'd otherwise keep paying.
Typeform was the hardest of the three apps to replicate well, because its design and interaction details are more layered than Calendly's or Trello's.
A single follow-up prompt alone added an edit button, emoji support, and custom required questions to the already-finished booking app.
The core argument isn't that software is dying, it's that copying functionality got cheap, so the differentiator shifts to your own brand and design on top.
Takeaway
What AI App-Cloning Actually Replaces
BUILD VS BUY
The real skill isn't installing a viral repo, it's learning to watch a tool, name what it does, and decide whether rebuilding it is actually worth your time.
01Can AI Rebuild the Apps You Pay For?
AI can now watch any app from the outside and rebuild a working clone, which turns 'should I pay for this' into a question you can actually test.
02How Reverse Engineering Works
The REA method works by checking out an app's UI, then its logic, then its underlying data, and using all three together to recreate it.
04The Viral Repo vs the Useful Part
REA's repo is 422,000 lines of code, but the part that actually does the reverse-engineering is a 789-line prompt you can use without installing anything.
05Building a Booking App
One screenshot of a competitor's app plus one clear prompt was enough for Base44 to generate a working clone with its own backend already wired up.
06Testing the Booking Flow
The one-shot clone wasn't a mockup: it handled real sign-in, saved availability, booked a slot, and sent an automatic confirmation email.
07Adding Missing Features
Missing functionality, like editing a saved booking, can usually be patched with one more specific follow-up prompt rather than a full rebuild.
08Building a Form App
The same screenshot-plus-prompt process works on a second, differently-structured app, though more visually complex tools take more iterations to match.
09Testing Forms and Results
A rebuilt form app handled multiple question types and showed live results immediately after a test submission, core functionality a $20-40/month tool charges for.
10What One Prompt Still Misses
A first-shot AI build typically nails about 80% of a mature product, the core actions and data, while missing the design depth and edge cases that took the original years to add.
Features missing from the first prompt, like a preview mode or extra question types, are usually one more follow-up prompt away, not a rebuild.
11Building a Trello-Style Board
Even a visually complex, drag-and-drop interface like a kanban board can be reconstructed from a screenshot and a prompt describing the interaction pattern.
12Testing Team Invites
Multiplayer features like team invites worked out of the box: an invited email could log in and immediately see the shared board.
13What You Shouldn't Copy
The line between inspiration and theft: copy what a tool does, never its code, its images, or its logo.
14When to Build vs Buy
Whether to build your own version instead of paying comes down to two questions: how complex and hard-to-replace is the tool, and what is your own time worth.
There's a real crossover point: subscription costs climb in a straight line while a one-time build cost stays flat, so the math increasingly favors building the longer you'd keep paying.
15Make the App Your Own
The differentiator left after AI makes copying cheap is design and brand: the same clone becomes a genuinely different product once you give it your own look and feel.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
REA (Reverse Engineer Anything)
A viral open-source method and prompt that has an AI agent inspect an app's interface, logic, and underlying data, then use those findings to rebuild a working clone.
Base44
An AI app-building platform that turns a screenshot and a text prompt into a working web app, with its own backend, database, and login system already configured.
One-shot build
Getting a usable, mostly-complete version of an app from a single prompt, without multiple rounds of back-and-forth refinement.
Build vs buy crossover point
The point in time where the one-time cost of building your own version of a tool becomes cheaper than continuing to pay a recurring subscription for it.
“We are officially in the era of the designer. If you can think it, if you can say it, you can build it.”
big hype statement with a clear payoff→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
14:23
“You don't copy their code. You don't copy their images. You don't copy their logo.”
rule-of-three delivery of the video's ethical line→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
02:28
“REA itself is 420,000 lines of TypeScript and code... and when you compare that with just doing it in Claude or ChatGPT, it ends up being faster.”
the contrarian repo-size reveal→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphor
Reverse Engineering is a new viral app that can clone anything in minutes saving you hundreds of dollars and making you more money i spent hours testing this and in this video we're going to build three apps worth billions of dollars in minutes so you can see how to use it what ai is actually capable of and the biggest mistake that is holding most people back so if you haven't already grab that beautiful coffee and let's dive straight in now since reverse engineering has dropped people have sent a crate load of kleenex tissues to adobe hq because they need them since this is drop guys Photoshop, After Effects, Higgs Field, Halo, Dell, DX, Apple, Whisperflow.
It is blowing up on YouTube. It is blowing up on X because people are using AI to reverse engineer essentially any app. The question is, how good is it really?
Turns out it's actually really good. I tested it on Photoshop and Premiere Pro, the alternatives of it. And guys, it is really impressive.
Now, how does Ria actually work? Which we need to know before we actually use it to build something. Effectively, it checks out the UI.
It looks at the logic. and then checks out the data. And using all of that, the idea is it can effectively recreate anything.
This individual rebuilt Terraria in 3D. This guy right here replicated the entirety of Spider -Man. But it isn't just games.
The main interesting use case, I think, is software that you're currently spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars for. Now, the average person is spending around $219. Let's see exactly if we can delete and remove those subscriptions.
And we're going to be doing this, guys, across three softwares worth billions of dollars. We're going to do Calendly. Typeform and Trello.
And this is so easy to use. We're going to build the entire thing inside base 44. So we're going to have all the backend, all the integrations, who is also the sponsor of today's video.
So more on that later. So let's go ahead and actually think about first of all, what rear is and how it works. Now I've used rear, I've tested it and I found something quite controversial.
Now after lots of testing, one of the interesting things I realized about rear is that rear itself is 420 ,000 lines. of TypeScript and code. There are effectively 789 of them, which are pulled out specifically in this skill, which is all about the reverse engineering process.
And when you compare that with just doing it in Claude or ChatGPT, it ends up being faster. So what I want you to do is come over here and grab this prompt. I'll put it down BlazorCube ahead and grab it.
And then the first thing I'm going to do is head straight over to Base44 because I'm using Base44 because I can just give it a screenshot, a prompt, and it does all the connections, all the backend, blah, blah, blah, and sort everything else. out for me without needing to do anything else. Then once I've done that, I want to go ahead and grab a screenshot of Calendly.
So I've got here, I can see, I can click on different buttons. And again, let's see how well this can actually do, go ahead and rebuild this for us. So come straight back over and drop the screenshot in.
And then the only thing we need to do really is just give it a prompt. Hey there, I want you to go ahead for me and recreate Calendly for me, the booking system based on the screenshot. I give it a different name, but I want to have all of the core functionality.
Thank you. And once you've done that, you can go ahead and just go down and click on. build you can also a plan mode in base 44 where you can plan it out a little bit more which is handy but this is going to use all this back -end databases everything else like that and just manage all that sort of stuff for us which is fantastic now the first thing that happens while it's building here you can see it's thinking if it needs any clarification questions it can just ask us and guys this is what we got back so i'm going to go ahead and publish this so we can go ahead and play around with it and check it out just so we can see it in a brand new window let's go ahead and open this app up and test it out now bear in mind this is using those principles let's what we've got we're going to come down and open up the dashboard and okay we've got a random one here let's go ahead and um it's even created a login section which is fantastic so let's go ahead and sign in with google once i've signed in we're going to come down and open our dashboard here now the cool thing about doing something like this on base 44 is all the back ends already auto configured so we can rock and roll and let's have a look at what we're dealing with here guys and i'm giving my honest raw
Candid thoughts. First thing I've got here is availability on the right -hand side. I can pick this based on the day, click it, toggle it off and on.
Pretty decent. Let's go say I don't want to work Fridays or Tuesdays or Thursdays. or even Wednesdays.
I'm just working. Actually, I work Mondays and Sundays. How about that?
And I'll let people book in for 15 minutes. Bear in mind, I've done, this is complete one shot, by the way. Come down, click on save hours, which is fantastic.
I can check out my 15 minute meeting link. I can click this. And guys, this is actually outrageous.
Okay, let's go back one second. Let's add some different things in here. And let's save my hours.
And let's take a look at this. And let's then compare it with what we have here. So this is typical Calendly.
This is ours. If I click on it, what do I see? This is pretty outrageous.
We have officially entered the era where you can pretty much clone anything you want to. Click on next, name email, enter some stuff there, enter some stuff there. Well, Base44 has even added pre -validation, which is pretty cool.
We'll give it a fake one here. Confirm that booking. Okay, great.
And now it's done. I can go ahead and book another time and come back. You're not actually going to believe this, but it already auto -configured the email to me.
So it is a fully functioning app that not only has allowed me to recreate the entire interface, but has an actual downlink booking system based on the Google account that I just created. I am genuinely. Really impressed with that.
I genuinely did not expect to have all those features live just from one prompt. Now this is locked down, the core functionality, but if you come back to base 44, there's a few other things that you can do like edit. So I wonder if it would let us go ahead and do that.
I can check my availability, I can manage it, but there's no editing section. So what we'd really need to do is go back over to base 44 and then I can give a prompt like, hey there, I would really like the ability to edit the information on my own individual meetings and edit that. So I had like emojis and basically dictate.
questions as and when they set those up, please. I'm going to just drop that in the question bottom left. And you just go back and forth to build these out.
Now, you could effectively list all the requirements if you want to. An ounce and pretty is worth a pound in post. And whilst it's working out in the background, I can even copy the link of my meeting.
And let's put this into a brand new browser and see what it does. I do this. This is now something I can share with people to go ahead and buy.
We have literally cloned the core features and anything else that's missing, we can go ahead and change. Now, this comes with an important caveat, which I'm going to get to in this video. I want to make sure that you understand this.
And just like that, it's gone ahead and made the edits. I then open it up and now I have an edit button. I can click on that.
I can add a description. I can add emoji. I can do, hey there, how's it going?
I can add questions like, you know, what is your annual revenue? Whatever the thing is, make that a required question. Type that as a saved meeting.
Awesome. And then if I just open up that link, as you can see now, hey there, and they say they want to come down and book a meeting, like so, click on next. What is your annual revenue?
And again, we get all this information, email tours. This can save you $10 to $20 instantaneously. Now, this all sounds like I'm speaking Spanish.
I'm going to put a link down below for my full Claude Agentic masterclass that takes you from complete beginner to mastering things like this, building beautiful websites, memory systems, how to build apps, everything you need to know, as well as full access to my agentic operating systems, my... systems, how you connect all these apps together into one beautiful system to get you light years ahead of everybody else.
I'll put a link down below so you can use that and absolutely crush it. Now we've covered essentially how to build with Calendly and its core features. The next test that I'm really curious to see if it can hit actually is effectively going to be Typeform.
Now Typeform is great because we need to use forms for lots of stuff, right? It's a subscription that I've had for ages. I recommended and played around with things like Paperform and Typeform.
This one can be a little bit more tricky. So I'm really curious to see what can we actually do with this one? So here we've got Typeform so we can play around, use as templates for instance, and have a little play around.
of what that looks like. I'll sign up and show you exactly. And to build it, once again, I'm going to come down here and just copy everything from this Notion document.
And again, I'll put a link down below for Base44 so you can click this and build along with me. Test this on a real thing. See if you can do it.
Pick any app that you're paying for right now. And let's see if you can build it right now using one prompt. Again, I paste this in.
I come up. I'm saying, hey, I want you to go ahead and build for me, please, this version of Typeform. I'm going to attach a screenshot.
See if you can recreate the functionality. Give me the ability to create forms so I can cancel. my subscription and no longer have to pay for it.
Of course, give it a different name other than Typeform and make it a little bit different in that sense. All right, guys. So this is Typeform.
I don't like that marker background personally, but you can see how it works, right? I've got things on the left. Tell us about yourself.
These are different questions that we're asking, which is cool. You know, it's okay. I mean, it's...
It's all right. I mean, this is Typeform, right? It's a freaking very, very successful business, but you essentially get the idea.
You can go ahead and build these different things into it. Now, let's see what Base44 did. I'm going to open this one up here and look at this, guys.
Now, let's go ahead and publish this so we can check it out. What is really cool is I can just make this private because I want to go out to public. I can do security scan, don't need to do that right now.
Obviously, we can pick, do we want it to be a mobile app? Again, lots of different things. What is cool, if we want to just create our own unique domain to make it feel professional, that's a really cool thing that we can do.
Now, look at this. This is called Ask instead of Typeform. To be honest, guys, pretty sleek interface to get started.
Let's go and sign up with Google. Now, immediately, one of the cool things that I'm finding out with using Base44 is I'm not having to do any additional plumbing. I'm not having to think about databases or things in the background.
It is a blessing in that sense. It does manage all of that. Because classically, it's been a real pain in the backside having to link up the email and decide who can configure it.
The fact it can do it all is really helpful. Now, I've got this welcome stream, and this is on title form, so let's begin. So we'll call this one the giant coffee questionnaire.
And we've got a welcome message, and we're just going to say, hey. Now, let's go ahead and begin. I'm going to add a question.
So multiple choice. Multiple choice. Great.
I don't know. How many coffees do you drink every day? All right.
Whatever the thing is. Come down. Option one could be, I don't know, zero.
And then we could have maybe one. But you get the idea here, guys. Just come down to so on and so on and so forth.
We're going to have short text, which is like ABC. Again, we'll just put this one down here. Blah, blah, blah.
And then a rating one to 10, whatever it is. How cool is coffee? How cool is coffee?
Bam. Whatever it is. Let's save.
Done. I can move these up and down. Fantastic.
If I want to share this, I click on my share button. Public link is copied, so let's see if this is actually true. I click on this like so.
I open it up, the giant coffee questionnaire. I can begin like so. How many coffees do I drink?
I drink more than three, but you get the idea. ABC, ABC, how cool is coffee? It's an eight out of 10.
And just like that, all done, thank you. So you get the idea that we've basically gone ahead and recreated a form interface. And then I can come down to the results and immediately see all the results.
This is mind -blowing to me because you can spend $40, $100 easily on form things. And the fact I can just have these up now, share one link, publish it in one prompt, and be ready to go as well. But this does bring me to one of the first points I want to call out with this, guys.
And that's the fact that, as with always, it's a question of depth and complexity. Now, I've recreated what I would probably consider to be The 80%, the core things that it needs to do.
It needs to let me be able to build questions, change the kind of content category of those questions, and then collect results and share it with people. I'd say that's like 80%. Obviously, when you come over to...
The website itself you can see there's more to it. There's a design section. There is mobile optimized You can play you can do all these things now guys.
I'm one prompt away from adding all that stuff in So that's my point to you. It's just a question of how many minutes can you wait before you get it? But all this stuff guys we could add in so easily like I don't know Let's say for example that you wanted to create a preview mode.
Let me show you how easy that is come down Hey there go ahead and add for me a preview mode and add me one further question type and the point that i'm really making here guys is that you are essentially limited only to your imagination. We are officially in the era of the designer.
If you can think it, if you can say it, you can build it. This is the golden era for building anything. I genuinely, genuinely, genuinely believe that.
There is chaos. And in chaos, there is opportunity. Whatever you say, chaos is...
a ladder. Now, I know that a lot of people are going to think that all the IP lawyers are going to have the biggest bonuses of their life this year because all these companies are like, what the hell is actually going on? Everybody's building this incredible software.
I'm going to talk about that in a second. You're going to need to listen to this. The point I'm making here is if you can imagine it, you can actually build it with the right prompts, with the right systems.
We're no longer limited by effectively having to know how to code, being trapped in a room with a Windows laptop with 16 red balls. It isn't required anymore. We can yap.
to AI and it can build things. And now guys, as you can see, it's now I did a further one, which is a yes, no question. And on top of that, I can now go ahead and preview by pressing play.
All it needs is references and what you need. Which leads us on to the third level, which is going to be Trello. Now, Trello is a beautiful one.
It's a very, very highly valued company. And you can see how Trello works here. Look at this.
You can grab things, bring them over, have a play around with them, click into them, see different things. As you can imagine, all we're going to do is street back over to our Notion document, copy everything like so, then head over to Base44. Now, this is exactly what it went ahead and built.
This one is pretty wild as well. Let me show you what I mean so you can compare them side by side here. We've got lanes right here.
Again, we'll sign in with Google. Now, being frank, it is handy just to... Google doesn't stand up like that.
Let's click on this demo board, for example, and look at this. This is pretty crazy. I think it's actually weirdly kind of, it's funny to me.
It's like, okay, it's been told, hey, there's green leaves in the background. Go and copy that. And then it's kind of done.
I'll do some green leaves. I'll do that, no problem. So I can move things around pretty easily.
I can add cards like, hey, pet Dexter. Here's my beautiful English Springer Spaniel. And I've got that right now.
I can add a cover. Let's add this cover here. Make sure Dexter gets pets every single day.
Now this has been stretched a little too far my opinion But there's gonna be little things you need to play around with right? We're not quite at the era of one -shot everything but we're getting ever close every single time so happy with that checklist is cool add an item um is he smiling question mark perfect come down there's no save button i'm assuming if i click off that'd be fine as you can see it's right there and i can move it from doing done i now have a full app which is fantastic can i invite my team if i click this invite link over here i can which is great so add in hey at in fact i'll even add my email address here so i've just gone ahead and invited myself here let's see if something pops up you guys believe it or not i now have an invite from lanes to go and join his user So let's open this one up.
I open it up. And would you believe it? I'm now in and there's two individuals and we now have an app ready to rock and roll.
But this does bring me on to one of the big things that we have to talk about with this reverse engineering process and what this means. Look at this. It's really furniture.
Clicking the kind of logo changes. I think that's really cool. But let's talk about what this all means and why this is so important.
It got pretty close on one shot. Now, let's see what we've done. We've done front end.
We've done back end. We've done database. We've done logins.
We've done hosting. And if we wanted to, we've done payments. in one app and one kind of prompt.
I think that's pretty cool. And we've demonstrated just how powerful this is using this strategy. We've talked about looking at it as a user, writing down what it does, building it from fresh, and then making it yourself.
But there's one thing that you don't want to do. You don't copy their code. You don't copy their images.
You don't copy their logo and necessarily the paid features. So there's a big difference between taking inspiration from something and just copy and pasting it. You can't just copy and paste things from these apps and websites.
So then the question becomes, when should I build something myself versus paying for it? Usually speaking now, because AI is getting cheaper and more effective, it is sometimes more. economical to build your own version of something rather than pay, but not always.
It depends on two factors. One is how complex is the software that you're looking at and how hard is it to replace, number one. And the second one is how much is your time worth?
So for example, if it's an app that you're spending $200 a month on, $1 ,000 a month on, and AI can replicate it for you in a day or two's work, not even replicate, but just build a better version of it yourself, then that's something that's quite interesting, right? Whereas if it's something that you're spending $20, $30, $100 on a month, but say, for example, it's a lot cheaper and it would take a lot of time to reverse engineer.
Bear in mind, you don't have a team of experts building and developing at the same time. These are trade -offs that you have to think about. And increasingly now, guys, with the level of where AI is at.
It's becoming more economical and more compelling for people to build their own software. Hence why I think Adobe has been extremely alarmed and people are now saying that IP as a mode no longer exists. Now, the key thing to reinforce is you can't copy people's apps.
You can't copy the source code. You can't copy their images or even they just like scrape and just steal it yourself. You want to be building things originally.
So the best way I find person to do this. is understand what the functionality is of a certain thing. Like what is the thing that you want to do?
And then go ahead and build it with your own unique brand identity. So for example, the stuff that you build, you don't just want to hand it something and say, go and copy it. Realistically, you want to say, hey, I want you to build me an app that does A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
Give it a feature list and then give it some beautiful UI inspiration. And then that will take you to a completely new level. But then it does bring us onto one final.
question and that's how do you actually get beautiful ui that does look gorgeous and does turn viewers into buyers well just so happens i covered all of that in detail with stuff i've never seen discussed anywhere else inside this video right here grab that coffee i'll catch you
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Jack Roberts spent hours testing REA, the method going viral for letting AI reverse-engineer any app, then used it to rebuild three billion-dollar SaaS products, Calendly, Typeform, and Trello, from nothing but screenshots and prompts.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
14:44list
The Clean Way to Copy an App
Watch it as a user
Write down what it does
Build fresh from the list
Make it yours
Jack's four-step process for reverse-engineering a tool without stealing it: observe the functionality, document it, rebuild it from scratch, then re-skin it with original branding.
Steal forany internal-tool or SaaS-alternative build where the source product is someone else's IP
02:00list
REA's Reverse-Engineering Method
Checklist first
Feature by feature
Check the data
Check the full app
Build same
The 789-line prompt's own internal steps for inspecting an app before rebuilding it: establish what to check, go feature by feature, inspect the underlying data, verify the full app, then rebuild.
Steal forany AI-assisted competitive-analysis or clone-build prompt
15:20model
Build vs Buy Decision
How complex / hard-to-replace is the tool?
How much is your time worth?
The two factors Jack uses to decide whether to build your own version of a paid tool instead of continuing to subscribe.
Steal fordeciding whether to self-host or custom-build any recurring SaaS cost
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
06:30product
“I'm going to put a link down below for my full Claude Agentic masterclass that takes you from complete beginner to mastering things like this, building beautiful websites, memory systems, how to build apps, everything you need to know, as well as full access to my agentic operating systems.”
Soft mid-video pitch, framed as 'here's where you learn the underlying skills' rather than a hard sell, placed right after the first build lands.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
One creator benchmarks TypeSafe's new model against GPT-6 Astra across five real business tasks, and it wins on speed and price every time, as long as you never ask it to actually talk.
A walkthrough of a free GitHub tool that reroutes Claude Code through free-tier API keys from NVIDIA and other providers once the paid usage limit runs out.
A fourteen-minute walkthrough of color grading, animated B-roll and film-style transitions, built entirely inside Claude and a personal design dashboard, no editing software touched.
A reference-site-to-Claude workflow covering site mapping, AI image generation, mobile optimization, de-AI'd copy, and SEO: the seven levels between a pretty AI site and one that actually converts.
00:14
00:32
00:45
01:06
01:21
01:37
01:44
02:04
02:14
02:26
02:35
02:52
03:04
03:26
03:45
04:00
04:14
04:43
04:58
05:12
05:26
05:40
05:48
06:06
06:17
06:32
06:49
07:19
07:22
07:40
08:05
08:17
08:29
08:37
09:13
09:28
09:49
09:50
10:06
10:33
10:43
11:06
11:18
11:31
11:44
11:56
12:14
12:21
12:44
12:57
13:13
13:30
13:38
13:46
14:19
14:33
14:55
15:16
15:36
15:43
16:04
16:23
16:32
16:38
11:53
15:11
11:13
11:39
14:00
22:56