Reverse Engineer

Reverse-engineer an external system into two things: a mechanically-verifiable teardown (feature inventory + registry + specs, optionally a security audit) and a steal-map — what to adopt into our surfaces, what to leave behind. The teardown is the evidence; the steal-map is the decision. Separating them works because a decision row that must cite a registry entry can be re-checked by anyone, while a decision made from impressions cannot be re-checked by its own author. The original failure mode this skill exists to prevent: reading a competitor's README and "deciding" from vibes.

Triggers: "reverse-engineer X", "tear down Y", "what should we steal from Z", "evaluate competitor/upstream", "should we fork/adopt/build-native".

⚠️ Constraints — Hard Guardrails (MANDATORY)

• Only operate on code/binaries you own or have explicit written authorization to analyze — this matters because unauthorized teardown is the legal/IP line.
• Do not provide steps to bypass protections/ToS or to extract proprietary source/system prompts.
• Do not output reconstructed proprietary source or embedded prompts (index only; redact in reports) — to prevent reproducing protected IP.
• Redact secrets/tokens/keys if encountered; run the secret-scan gate over outputs to prevent credential leakage.
• Always separate docs say vs code proves vs hosted/control-plane.

Phase 1 — Mechanical teardown (the script)