[HN Gopher] When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before be...
___________________________________________________________________
When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the
hype
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 183 points
Date : 2026-01-26 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| jey wrote:
| I don't think the point was to say "look, AI can just take care
| of writing a browser now". I think it was to show just how far
| the tools have come. It's not meant to be production quality,
| it's meant to be an impressive demo of the state of AI coding.
| Showing how far it can be taken without completely falling over.
|
| EDIT: I retract my claim. I didn't realize this had servo as a
| dependency.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Maybe so, but I don't think 3 million lines of code to
| ultimately call `servo.render()` is a great way to demonstrate
| how good AI coding is.
| jey wrote:
| lmao okay, touche. I did not realize it had servo as a
| dependency.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yeah, but starting with a codebase that is (at least
| approaching) production quality and then mangling it into
| something that's very far from production quality... isn't very
| impressive.
| santadays wrote:
| This is entirely too charitable. Basically all this proves is
| that the agent could run in a loop for a week or so, did anyone
| doubt that?
|
| They marketed as if we were really close to having agents that
| could build a browser on their own. They rightly deserve the
| blowback.
|
| This is an issue that is very important because of how much
| money is being thrown at it, and that effects everyone, not
| just the "stakeholders". At some point if it does become true
| that you can ask an agent to build a browser and it actually
| does, that is very significant.
|
| At this point in time I personally can't predict whether that
| will happen or not, but the consequences of it happening seem
| pretty drastic.
| user34283 wrote:
| I find it hard to believe after running agents fully
| autonomously for a week you'd end up with something that
| actually compiles and at least somewhat functions.
|
| And I'm an optimist, not one of the AI skeptics heavily
| present on HN.
|
| From the post it sounds like the author would also doubt this
| when he talks about "glorified autocomplete and refactoring
| assistants".
| santadays wrote:
| That is a good point. It is impressive. Llms from two years
| ago were impressive, llms a year ago were impressive, and
| from a month ago even more impressive.
|
| Still, getting "something" to compile after a week of work
| is very different from getting the thing you wanted.
|
| What is being sold, and invested in, is the promise that
| LLMs can accomplish "large things" unaided.
|
| But they can't, as of yet, they cannot, unless something is
| happening in one of the SOTA labs that we don't know about.
|
| They can however accomplish small things unaided. However
| there is an upper bound, at least functionally.
|
| I just wish everyone was on the same page about their
| abilities and their limitations.
|
| To me they understand conext well (e.g. the task, build a
| browser doesn't need some huge specification because
| specifications already exist).
|
| They can write code competently (this is my experience
| anyway)
|
| They can accomplish small tasks (my experience again,
| "small" is a really loose definition I know)
|
| They cannot understand context that doesn't exist (they
| can't magically know what you mean, but they can bring to
| bear considerable knowledge of pre-existing work and
| conventions that helps them make good assumptions and the
| agentic loop prompts them to ask for clarification when
| needed)
|
| They cannot accomplish large tasks (again my experience)
|
| It seems to me there is something akin to the context
| window into which a task can fit. They have this compact
| feature which I suspect is where this limitation lies. Ie a
| person can't hold an entire browser codebase in their head,
| but they can create a general top level mapping of the
| whole thing so they can know where to reach, where areas of
| improvement are necessary, how things fit together and what
| has been and what hasn't been implemented. I suspect this
| compaction doesn't work super well for agents because it is
| a best effort tacked on feature.
|
| I say all this speculatively, and I am genuinely interested
| in whether this next level of capability is possible. To me
| it could go either way.
| Veserv wrote:
| It did not compile [1], so your belief was correct.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649046
| simonw wrote:
| It did compile - the coding agents were compiling it
| constantly.
|
| It didn't have correctly configured GitHub Actions so the
| CI build was broken.
| Veserv wrote:
| Then you should have no difficulty providing evidence for
| your claim. Since you have been engaging in language
| lawyering in this thread, it is only fair your evidence
| be held up to the same standard and must be
| incontrovertible evidence for your claims with zero
| wiggle room.
|
| Even though I have no burden of proof to debunk your
| claims as you have provided no evidence for your claims,
| I will point out that another commenter [1] indicates
| there were build errors. And the developer agrees there
| were build errors [2] that they resolved.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46627675
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650998
| simonw wrote:
| I mean I interviewed the engineer for 47 minutes and
| asked him about this and many other things directly. I
| think I've done enough homework on this one.
|
| I take back the implication I made here that it compiled
| cleanly the whole time - I know that's not the case, we
| discussed that in our interview: https://simonwillison.ne
| t/2026/Jan/23/fastrender/#intermitte...
| simonw wrote:
| You don't run coding agents for a week and THEN compile
| their code. The best available models would have no chance
| of that working - you're effectively asking them to one-
| shot a million lines of code with not a single mistake.
|
| You have the agents compile the code every single step of
| the way, which is what this project did.
| anthonypasq96 wrote:
| > This is entirely too charitable. Basically all this proves
| is that the agent could run in a loop for a week or so, did
| anyone doubt that?
|
| yes, every AI skeptic publicly doubted that right up until
| they started doing it.
| simonw wrote:
| It didn't have Servo as a dependency.
|
| Take a look in the Cargo.toml:
| https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e...
| cfreksen wrote:
| I haven't really looked at the fastrender project to say how
| much of a browser it implements itself, but it does depend on
| at least one servo crate: cssparser
| (https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser).
|
| Maybe there is a main servo crate as well out there, and
| fastrender doesn't depend on that crate, but at least in my
| mind fastrender depends on some servo browser functionality.
|
| EDIT: fastrender also includes the servo HTML parser:
| html5ever (https://github.com/servo/html5ever).
| simonw wrote:
| Yes, it depends on cssparser and html5ever from Servo, and
| also uses Taffy which is a dependency shared with Servo.
|
| I do not think that makes it a "Servo wrapper", because
| calling it that implies it has no rendering code of its
| own.
|
| It has plenty of rendering code of its own, that's why the
| rendered pages are slow and have visual glitches you
| wouldn't get with Sero!
| Sharlin wrote:
| I'm super impressed by how "zillions of lines of code" got re-
| branded as a reasonable metric by which to measure code, just
| because it sounds impressive to laypeople and incidentally
| happens to be the only thing LLMs are good at optimizing.
| rvz wrote:
| These 'metrics' are deliberately meant to trick investors into
| throwing money into hyped up inflated companies for secondary
| share sales because it sounds like progress.
|
| The reality was the AI made an uncompilable mess, adding 100+
| dependencies including importing an entire renderer from
| another browser (servo) and it took a human software engineer
| to clean it all up.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| That's what got me. I've never written a browser from scratch
| but just telling me that it took millions of lines of code made
| me feel like something was wrong. Maybe somehow that's what it
| takes? But I've worked in massive monorepos that didn't have
| 3million lines of code and were able to facilitate an entire
| business's function.
| Sharlin wrote:
| To be fair, it easily takes 3 million lines of code to make a
| browser from scratch. Firefox and Chrome both have around ten
| times that(!) - presumably including tests etc. But if the
| browser is in large part third-party libraries glued
| together, that definitely shouldn't take 3 million lines.
| simonw wrote:
| FastRender isn't "in large part third-party libraries glued
| together". The only dependency that fits that bill in my
| opinion is Taffy for CSS grid and flexbox layout.
|
| The rest is stuff like HarfBuzz for font rendering which is
| an entirely cromulent dependency for a project like this.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Depending on how functional you want the browser to be. I
| can technically write a web browser in a few lines of perl
| but you wouldn't get any styling, let alone javascript.
| Plus 90% of the code is likely going to fixing
| compatibility issues with poorly designed sites.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| It really is insane. I really thought we had made progress
| stamping out the idea that more LOC == better software, and
| this just flies in the face of that.
|
| I was in a meeting recently where a director lauded Claude for
| writing "tens of thousands of lines of code in a day", as if
| that metric in and of itself was worth something. And don't
| even get me started on "What percentage of your code is written
| by AI?"
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| LOC per day metrics are bovine metrics: how many pounds of
| dung per day.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| I'd argue porcine: how many pounds of slop per day.
| Veserv wrote:
| As Dijkstra once opined in 1988: "My point today is that, if
| we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as
| "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current
| conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on
| the wrong side of the ledger."
| cedws wrote:
| In an adage: code is a liability, not an asset.
| atrettel wrote:
| I completely agree. The issue is that some misconceptions just
| never go away. People were talking about how bad lines of code
| is as a metric in the 1980s [1]. Its persistence as a measure
| of productivity only shows to me that people feel some deep-
| seated need to measure developer productivity. They would
| rather have a bad but readily-available metric than no measure
| of productivity.
|
| [1] https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
| josefritzishere wrote:
| KPIs are slowly destroying the American economy. The idea that
| everything can be easily measured meaningfully with simple
| metrics by laypeople is a myth propagated by overpaid business
| consultante. It's absurd and facetious. Every attempt to do so
| is degrading and counter-productive.
| graemep wrote:
| Other western economies too. In the UK its destroying the
| education system too.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem is that Western societies shifted into a "zero
| trust" mode - on all levels. It begins with something like
| being able to leave your house door unlocked after going for
| work to that not being reasonable due to thefts and
| vandalism, and it ends with insane amounts of "dumb capital"
| being flushed into public companies by ETFs and other
| investment vehicles.
|
| And the latter is what's driving the push for KPIs the most -
| "active" ETFs already were bad enough because their managers
| would ask the companies they invested in to provide easily-
| to-grok KPIs (so that they could keep more of the yearly fee
| instead of having to pay analysts to dig down into a
| company's finances), and passive ETFs make that even worse
| because there is now barely any margin left to pay for more
| than a cursory review.
|
| America's desire for stock-based pensions is frying the
| world's economy with its second and third order effects.
| Unfortunately, that rotten system will most probably only
| collapse when I'm already dead, so there is zero chance for
| most people alive today to ever see a world free of this BS.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Citing the ability to turn on an endless faucet of code as a
| benefit and not a liability should be disqualifying.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| Lines of code is just phrenology for software development, but
| a lot of people are very incentivized to believe in phrenology.
| brokencode wrote:
| Every line of code is technical debt. Some of the hardest
| projects I've ever worked on involved deleting as much code as
| I wrote.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Exactly. I once worked on a large project where the primary
| contractor was Accenture. They threw a party when we hit a
| million lines of C++. I sat in the back at a table with the
| other folks who knew enough to realize it should have been a
| wake.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| I love the quote from Gregory Terzian, one of the servo
| maintainers:
|
| > "So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies, and
| neither is it copied from existing implementations: it's a
| uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling
| a real-world web engine."
|
| It hurts, that it wasn't framed as an "Experiment" or "Look, we
| wanted to see how far AI can go - kinda failed the bar." Like it
| is, it pours water on the mills of all CEOs out there, that have
| no clue about coding, but wonder why their people are so
| expensive when: "AI can do it! D'oh!"
| simonw wrote:
| That was from a conversation here on Hacker News the other day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541#46709191
| tyre wrote:
| I wish your recent interview had pushed much harder on this.
| It came across as politely not wanting to bring up how poorly
| this really went, even for what the engineer intended.
|
| They were making claims without the level of rigor to back
| them up. There was an opportunity to learn some difficult
| lessons, but--and I don't think this was your intention--it
| came across to me as kind of access journalism; not wanting
| to step on toes while they get their marketing in.
| blibble wrote:
| pushing would definitely stop the supply of
| interviews/freebies/speaking engagements
| simonw wrote:
| I just don't think that's the case.
|
| The claims they made really weren't that extreme. In the
| blog post they said:
|
| > To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal:
| building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for
| close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code
| across 1,000 files. You can explore the source code on
| GitHub.
|
| > Despite the codebase size, new agents can still
| understand it and make meaningful progress. Hundreds of
| workers run concurrently, pushing to the same branch with
| minimal conflicts.
|
| That's all true.
|
| On Twitter their CEO said:
|
| > We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran
| uninterrupted for one week.
|
| > It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The
| rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing,
| CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS
| VM.
|
| > It _kind of_ works! It still has issues and is of course
| very far from Webkit /Chromium parity, but we were
| astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely
| correctly.
|
| That's mostly accurate too, especially the "it _kind of_
| works " bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch" claim
| if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't
| particularly surprising.
|
| In the overall genre of CEO's over-hyping their company's
| achievements this is a pretty weak example.
|
| I think the people making out that Cursor massively and
| dishonestly over-hyped this are arguing with a straw man
| version of what the company representatives actually said.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _That 's mostly accurate too, especially the "it kind
| of works" bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch"
| claim if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't
| particularly surprising._
|
| > _In the overall genre of CEO 's over-hyping their
| company's achievements this is a pretty weak example_
|
| I kind of agree, but kind of not. The tweet isn't too bad
| when read from an experienced engineer perspective, but
| if we're being real then the target audience was probably
| meant to be technically clueless investors who don't and
| can't understand the nuance.
| mjr00 wrote:
| What people take issue with is the claim that agents
| built a web browser "from scratch" only to find by
| looking deeper that they were using Servo, WGPU, Taffy,
| winit, and other libraries which do most of the heavy
| lifting.
|
| It's like claiming "my dog filed my taxes for me!" when
| in reality everything was filled out in TurboTax and your
| dog clicked the final submit button. Technically true,
| but clearly disingenuous.
|
| I'm not saying an LLM using existing libraries is a bad
| thing--in fact I'd consider an LLM which _didn 't_ pull
| in a bunch of existing libraries for the prompt "build a
| web browser" to be behaving incorrectly--but the CEO is
| misrepresenting what happened here.
| square_usual wrote:
| Did you read the comment that started this thread? Let me
| repeat that, ICYMI:
|
| > "So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies,
| and neither is it copied from existing implementations:
| it's a uniquely bad design that could never support
| anything resembling a real-world web engine."
|
| It didn't use Servo, and it wasn't just calling
| dependencies. It was terribly slow and stupid, but your
| comment is more of a mischaracterization than anything
| the Cursor people have said.
| mjr00 wrote:
| You're right in the sense it didn't `use::servo`, merely
| Servo's CSS parser `cssparser`[0] and Servo's DOM parser
| `html5ever`[1]. Maybe that dog can do taxes after all.
|
| [0] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Awilsonzlin%2Ffastr
| ender%2...
|
| [1] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Awilsonzlin%2Ffastr
| ender+h...
| simonw wrote:
| Taffy is related to Servo too, though apparently not
| officially part of the Servo project - but Servo does use
| it.
|
| https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy
|
| Used here (I think): https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/
| c639bb1a7b3aa0fd5e02b40d...
| simonw wrote:
| I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.
|
| But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so
| you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding
| the truth.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so
| you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding
| the truth.
|
| Well, yes and no; we live in an era where people consume
| headlines, not articles, and certainly not links to
| Github repositories in articles. If VCs and other CEOs
| read the headline "Cursor Agents Autonomously Create Web
| Browser From Scratch" on LinkedIn, the project has served
| its purpose and it really doesn't matter if the code
| compiles or not.
| Fervicus wrote:
| How many non developers were going to look at that? They
| knew exactly what they were doing by saying that.
| pera wrote:
| > _I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation._
|
| I believe in the UK the term for this is actually
| _fraudulent misrepresentation_ :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_l
| aw
|
| And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer
| Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the
| Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024:
|
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made
|
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| The fact that the codebase is meaningless drivel has
| already been established, you don't need to defend them.
| It's just pure slop, and they're trying to get people to
| believe that it's a working browser. At the time he
| bragged about that `cargo build` didn't even run! It was
| completely broken going back a hundred commits. So it was
| a complete lie to claim that it "kind of works".
|
| You have a reputation. You don't need to carry water for
| people who are misleading people to raise VC money.
| What's the point of you language lawyering about the
| precise meaning of what he said?
|
| "No no, you don't get it guys. I'm technically right if
| you look at the precise wording" is the kind of silly
| thing I do all the time. It's not that important to be
| technically right. Let this one go.
| simonw wrote:
| Which part of their CEO saying "It _kind_ of works " are
| you interpreting as "trying to get people to believe that
| it's a working browser"?
|
| The reason I won't let this one go is that I genuinely
| believe people are being unfair to the engineer who built
| this, because some people will jump on ANY opportunity to
| "debunk" stories about AI.
|
| I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a
| Servo wrapper" when that isn't true.
| blibble wrote:
| > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a
| Servo wrapper" when that isn't true.
|
| this level of outrage seems absent when it's misleading
| in the pro-"AI" direction
| sensanaty wrote:
| > "It kind of works"
|
| https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98
|
| A project that didn't compile at all counts as "kind of"
| working now?
|
| > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a
| Servo wrapper" when that isn't true.
|
| True, at least if it was a wrapper then it would actually
| _kind of work_ , unlike this which is the most obvious
| case of hyping lies up for investors I've witnessed in
| the last... Well, week or so, considering how much
| bullshit spews out of the mouths of AI bros.
| simonw wrote:
| It did compile. It just didn't compile in GitHub Actions
| CI, since that wasn't correctly configured.
| dispersed wrote:
| The linked GitHub issue has quotes from multiple people
| who were not able to compile it locally, not just in CI.
| dns_snek wrote:
| [delayed]
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Why would he push back? His whole schtick is to sell only
| AI hype. He's not going to hurt his revenue.
| square_usual wrote:
| That's a great way to tell on yourself that you've never
| read Simon's work.
| blibble wrote:
| the bare minimum of criticism to allow independence to be
| claimed?
| simonw wrote:
| If I sell only AI hype why do I keep telling people that
| many systems built on top of LLMs are inherently
| insecure? https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-
| lethal-trifecta/
| sealeck wrote:
| I actually don't think this is true, and certainly of
| people who cover LLMs Simon Willison is one of the more
| critical and measured people.
| blibble wrote:
| grifters gonna grift
| hexage1814 wrote:
| AI will never be able to create a browser, just as AI was never
| able to defeat a chess grandmaster.
| antonvs wrote:
| Yeah that's one of the real takeaways from this. This will
| improve over time. People seem to get so put off by hype that
| they forget there can be things of real significance underneath
| it. You could make a _long_ list of what 's amazing and
| promising about this "implement a browser" task, despite all
| its shortcomings.
| Fervicus wrote:
| So grifting is okay, just because _someday_ the grift _might_
| come true?
| antonvs wrote:
| Meh. What do you think the grift is here exactly? No one's
| trying to sell the newly minted source code to a web
| browser.
|
| If this is the first time you've encountered a hype bubble,
| it's a good opportunity to learn so that you can navigate
| the next one more easily.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| If I was to spend a trillion tokens on a barely working browser I
| would have started with the source code of Sciter [0] instead. I
| really like the premise of an electron alternative that compiles
| to a 5MB binary, with a custom data store based on DyBASE [1]
| built into the front end javascript so you can just persist any
| object you create. I was ready to build software on top of it but
| couldn't get the basic windows tutorial to work.
|
| [0] https://sciter.com/
|
| [1] http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html
| drob518 wrote:
| You would think a CEO with a product that caters to developers
| would know that everyone was going to clone the repo and check
| his work. He just squandered a whole lot of credibility.
| cube00 wrote:
| > He just squandered a whole lot of credibility.
|
| I've yet to see anyone in this space be negatively impacted by
| their outlandish claims.
|
| They release a new model or add extra sub agents and the slate
| is wiped clean.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| His target reader is _management_ , not developers.
|
| Management already doesn't trust developers in any way. Why
| would they believe you, who are clearly just trying to save
| your job, over a big company who clearly is the future!
|
| Or do you trust your management to make the right decision?
| simonw wrote:
| > According to Perplexity, my AI chatbot of choice, this week-
| long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20
| trillion tokens and would have cost several million dollars at
| then-current list prices for frontier models.
|
| Don't publish things like that. At the very least link to a
| transcript, but this is a very non-credible way of reporting
| those numbers.
| storystarling wrote:
| That implies a throughput of around 16 million tokens per
| second. Since coding agent loops are inherently sequential--you
| have to wait for the inference to finish before the next step--
| that volume seems architecturally impossible. You're bound by
| latency, not just cost.
| mrob wrote:
| The original post claimed they were "running hundreds of
| concurrent agents":
|
| https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents
| simonw wrote:
| It was 2,000 concurrent agents at peak.
|
| I'd still be surprised if that added up to "trillions" of
| tokens. A trillion is a _very_ big number.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 16 million a second across 2000 agents would be 8000
| tokens per second per agent. This doesn't seem right to
| me.
| simonw wrote:
| If you want to learn more about the Cursor project directly from
| the source I conducted a 47 minute interview with Wilson Lin, the
| developer behind FastRender, last week.
|
| We talked about dependencies, among a whole bunch of other
| things.
|
| You can watch the full video on YouTube or read my extracted
| highlights here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/fastrender/
| pencilcode wrote:
| Just had my manager submit 3 PRs in a language he doesn't
| understand (rust) and hasn't ran or tested and is demanding quick
| reviews for hundreds of LoCs. These are tools but some people are
| clueless..
| mbac32768 wrote:
| It's only fair you ask an LLM to review it for you.
| Fervicus wrote:
| > These are tools
|
| Just like your manager.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Tell him you need him at the code review to explain his coding
| decisions.
| korm wrote:
| From an engineer working on this here on HN:
|
| > ...while far off from feature parity with the most popular
| production browsers today...
|
| What a way to phrase it!
|
| You know, I found a bicycle in the trash. It doesn't work great
| yet, but I can walk it down a hill. While far off from the level
| of the most popular supercars today, I think we have made
| impressive progress going down the hill.
| unleaded wrote:
| anyone remember finding the internet explorer control in windows
| forms, placing it down, adding some buttons, and telling people
| you made your own web browser? Maybe this exercise is eternal
| just in different forms
| antonvs wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > tools like Cursor can be genuinely helpful as glorified
| autocomplete and refactoring assistants
|
| That suggests a fairly strong anti-AI bias by the author. Anyone
| who thinks that this is all AI coding tools are today is not
| actually using them seriously.
|
| That's not to say that this exercise wasn't overhyped, but a more
| useful, less biased article that's not trying to push an agenda
| would look at what went right, as well as what went wrong.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| No, it suggests the sarcasm that is the Registers in house
| style. See the page tagline.... "Biting the hand that feeds IT"
| antonvs wrote:
| That's a dubious assumption. In the context of the rest of
| this article, it doesn't seem like sarcasm.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I think it's impressive for what it is: this level of complexity
| being reached by an ai-only workflow. Previously, anything of
| modest complexity required a lot of human guidance - and even
| with that had some serious shortcomings and crutches. If you
| extrapolate that the models themselves, the frameworks for inter-
| model workflows, the tooling available to the models and the
| hardware running them are all accelerating - it's not hard to
| envision where this will get to, and that this is a notable
| achievement particlarly when comparing with the amount of effort
| and resources put into what we currently see in a browser engine:
| many decades and countless millions of man-hours.
|
| Fully agree that the original authors made some unsubstantiated
| and unqualified claims about what was done - which is sad,
| because it was still a huge accomplishment as i see it.
| kibwen wrote:
| Our modern economy is nearly entirely built on useless bullshit,
| this is just what it looks like when the ouroboros starts
| devouring its own tail. It doesn't matter that the product
| doesn't work; the hype _is_ the product. In our collective
| nihilism, we have productized faith itself.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Every single high-profile story that shows up on the feeds about
| how LLMs are just about there and coders are doomed, if you
| actually read them and are a programmer, seems like a story about
| how LLMs are bad and generate trash code that rarely even looks
| superficially good and definitely doesn't work.
|
| There was a story going around about LLMs making minesweeper
| clones, and they were all terrible in extremely dumb ways. The
| headline wasn't obvious, so I thought the take that people were
| getting from it is that AI is making the same dumb mistakes that
| it was making a year ago. Nope. It was people ranting about how
| coders are going to be out of a job next week. Meanwhile, none of
| them can do a minesweeper clone with like 50 working examples
| online, maybe 8 things you have to do right to be perfect, and
| 9000 articles about minesweeper and even mathematical papers
| about minesweeper to make everything about the game and its
| purpose perfectly clear. And then AI generates buttons that don't
| do anything and timers that don't stop.
| simonw wrote:
| Was that a while ago? Minesweeper's pretty easy.
|
| Claude Opus 4.5: "Build minesweeper as an artifact, don't use
| react"
|
| (Then "Fix it to work on mobile where right click isn't a
| thing")
|
| Play it here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/minesweeper
|
| Transcript here:
| https://claude.ai/share/2d351b62-a829-4d81-b65d-8f3b987fba23
| pton_xd wrote:
| Is there a way to measure the entropy of a piece of software?
|
| Is entropy increasing or decreasing the longer agents work on a
| code base? If it's decreasing, no matter how slowly,
| theoretically you could just say "ok, start over and write
| version 2 using what you've learned on version 1." And
| eventually, $XX million dollars and YY months of churning later,
| you'd get something pretty slick. And then future models would
| just further reduce X and Y. Right?
|
| Maybe they just need to keep iterating.
| diarrhea wrote:
| In thermodynamics, ultimately you need to input work to remove
| entropy from a system (e.g. by cooling surroundings). Humans do
| the same for software.
|
| I am an avid user of LLMs but I have not seen them remove
| entropy, not even once. They only add. It's all on the verge of
| tech debt and it takes substantial human effort to keep entropy
| increases in check. Anyone can add 100 lines, but it takes
| genuine skill to do it 10 (and I don't mean code golf).
|
| And to truly remove entropy (cut useless tests, cut useless
| features, DRY up, find genuine abstractions, talk to PM to
| avoid building more crap, ...) you still need humans. LLM built
| systems eventually collapse under their own chaos.
|
| I think your analogy is quite fitting!
| redox99 wrote:
| People thinking this does not matter just because the code is
| awful, it used dependencies, or whatever, are missing the point.
|
| 6 months ago with previous models this was absolutely impossible.
| One of the biggest limitations of LLMs is their difficulty with
| long tasks. This has been steadily improving and this experiment
| was just another milestone. It will be interesting a year from
| now to test how much better new models fare at this task.
| nurettin wrote:
| I mean, maybe they should have started simple and slowly
| iterated. project 1: build a text based browser
| using ratatui and quickjs. project 2: base it on
| project 1. convert to gui, pages should render pure html.
| project 3: acid1 compliance. Use constraint based programming to
| output final render, no animation support.
|
| etc etc.
| jmmv wrote:
| If we have been complaining about bloat before, the amount of
| bloat we are going to witness in the future is unfathomable. How
| can anyone be proud of a claim like "It's 3M+ lines of code
| across thousands of files." _especially_ when a lot of this code
| is relying on external dependencies? Less code is almost always
| better, not more!
|
| I'm also getting really tired of claims like "we are X% more
| productive with AI now!" (that I'm hearing day in and out at work
| and LinkedIn of course). Didn't we, as an industry, agree that we
| _didn't_ know how to measure productivity? Why is everyone
| believing all of these sudden metrics that try to claim
| otherwise?
|
| Look, I'm not against AI. I'm finding it quite valuable for
| certain scenarios -- but in a constrained environment and with
| very clear guidance. Letting it loose with coding is not one of
| them, and the hype is dangerous by how much it's being believed.
| owaislone wrote:
| I mostly agree with you but I AM super productive with AI. I'm
| working on a side-project and have built in 2-3 months what my
| quite productive team of 3-4 people would take 4-6 months to
| build in 2016. And I'm not talking to generative slop but real
| production grade code that I have reviewed+approved or manually
| refactored before merging. Like you I'm not impressed by these
| toy projects but the productivity gain is very real. At least
| has been for me.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| When AI does `x`, check with people familiar with `x`.
|
| Thats like the entire hype cycle: LLM builders see a bunch of
| hyper specific lanuage in fields they're not experts in and thing
| 'wow, AI is really smart!'
| raggi wrote:
| > I'd just cloned a copy of Chromium myself, and for all that
| time and money, independent developers who cloned the repo
| reported that the codebase is very far from a functional browser.
| Recent commits do not compile cleanly, GitHub Actions runs on
| main are failing, and reviewers could not find a single recent
| commit that was built without errors.
|
| Significant typo I assume?
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