An AI agent reverse-engineered TikTok's app for under $20
Hermes and REA and GLM 5.3 = Reverse engineering TikTok app for less than $20
A 5.6B-video TikTok dataset on Hugging Face led the author to replicate its headless scraping pipeline, whose secret sauce was paywalled at $1,699. Using Hermes Agent, the open-source Reverse Engineer Anything repo, and GLM 5.3, the agent decompiled the app, bypassed certificate pinning, and ran TikTok's own native signing library through unidbg on a plain server — no phone, no emulator.
The work we needed was happening under the floor we were standing on, which is worth knowing early because it kills the obvious plan of hooking the signer and reading its output.