Reverse engineering isn’t about “breaking” software or bypassing systems.
It’s about understanding existing behavior when documentation stops being useful.
As developers, we often assume that design lives exclusively in source code.
In practice, real design also lives in places like:
- compiled artifacts
- execution order
- data layout
- side effects between subsystems
When you reverse engineer a system, you are forced to answer uncomfortable but essential questions:
- Why does this state exist at all?
- Which assumptions are stable, and which are accidental?
- What breaks if this code runs earlier, later, or twice?
These are not niche questions.
They are the same questions you should be asking when designing new software.
Reverse engineering removes intent, comments, and naming — but it does not remove structure.
What remains is behavior. And behavior is the most honest form of design.
In that sense, reverse engineering is software engineering without the safety net of intention-revealing code.
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