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Scaling long-running autonomous coding

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Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#81

Post by qingcharles »

tired_and_awake wrote: post #28

The moment all code is interacted with through agents I cease to care about code quality. The only thing that matters is the quality of the product, cost of maintenance etc. exactly the thing we measure software development orgs against. It could be handy to have these projects deployed to demonstrate their utility and efficacy? Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed, like who cares if agents code is hard to r…

We don't read the binary output of our C compilers because we trust it to be correct almost every time. ("It's a compiler bug" is more of a joke than a real issue)

If AI could reach the point where we actually trusted the output, then we might stop checking it.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#82

Post by ares623 »

qingcharles wrote: post #81
tired_and_awake wrote: post #28

The moment all code is interacted with through agents I cease to care about code quality. The only thing that matters is the quality of the product, cost of maintenance etc. exactly the thing we measure software development orgs against. It could be handy to have these projects deployed to demonstrate their utility and efficacy? Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed, like who cares if agents code is hard to r…

We don't read the binary output of our C compilers because we trust it to be correct almost every time. ("It's a compiler bug" is more of a joke than a real issue) If AI could reach the point where we actually trusted the output, then we might stop checking it.

“If” doing a lot of work here

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#83

Post by conradev »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #23
dist-epoch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everything exists in the training sets. All non-research software is just a mishmash of various standard modules and algorithms.

Not everything, only code-bases of existing (open-source?) applications. But what would be the point of re-creating existing applications? It would be useful if you can produce a better version of those applications. But the point in this experiment was to produce something "from scratch" I think. Impressive yes, but is it useful? A more practically useful task would be for Mozilla Foundation and others to ask AI to…

Re-creating closed source applications as open source would have a clear benefit because people could use those applications in a bunch of new ways. (implied: same quality bar)

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#84

Post by csomar »

embedding-shape wrote: post #17

Did anyone manage to run the tests from the repository itself? The code seems filled with errors and warnings, as far as I can tell none of them because of the platform I'm on (Linux). I went and looked at the Action workflow history for some pages, and seems CI been failing for a while, PRs also all been failing CI but merged. How exactly was this verified to be something to be used as an successful example, or am I…

You can stop reading the article from here:

> Today's agents work well for focused tasks, but are slow for complex projects.

What does slow mean? Slower than humans? Need faster GPUs? What does it even imply? Too slow to produce the next token? Too slow in attempts to be usable? Need human intervention?

This piece is made and written to keep the bubble inflating further.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#85

Post by handfuloflight »

tehsauce wrote: post #69

I was excited to try it out so I downloaded the repo and ran the build. However there were 100+ compilation errors. So I checked the commit history on github and saw that for at least several pages back all recent commits had failed in the CI. It was not clear which commit I should pick to get the semi-working version advertised. I started looking in the Cargo.toml to at least get an idea how the project was construc…

Let us all generate our own custom cursors.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#86

Post by energy123 »

trjordan wrote: post #8

This is going to sound sarcastic, but I mean this fully: why haven't they merged that PR. The implied future here is _unreal cool_. Swarms of coding agents that can build anything, with little oversight. Long-running projects that converge on high-quality, complex projects. But the examples feel thin. Web browsers, Excel, and Windows 7 exist, and they specifically exist in the LLM's training sets. The closest to real…

> Long-running projects that converge

This is how I think about it. I care about asymptotics. What initial conditions (model(s) x workflow/harness x input text artefacts) causes convergence to the best steady state? The number of lines of code doesn't have to grow, it could also shrink. It's about the best output.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#87

Post by jkelleyrtp »

tehsauce wrote: post #69

I was excited to try it out so I downloaded the repo and ran the build. However there were 100+ compilation errors. So I checked the commit history on github and saw that for at least several pages back all recent commits had failed in the CI. It was not clear which commit I should pick to get the semi-working version advertised. I started looking in the Cargo.toml to at least get an idea how the project was construc…

WGPU for render, winit for window, servo css engine, taffy for layout sounds eerily similar to our existing open source Rust browser blitz.

https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz

Maybe we ended up in the training data!

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#88

Post by bonesss »

snek_case wrote: post #68
embedding-shape wrote: post #17

Did anyone manage to run the tests from the repository itself? The code seems filled with errors and warnings, as far as I can tell none of them because of the platform I'm on (Linux). I went and looked at the Action workflow history for some pages, and seems CI been failing for a while, PRs also all been failing CI but merged. How exactly was this verified to be something to be used as an successful example, or am I…

I found the codebase very hard to navigate. Hundreds (over a thousand?) tiny files with less than 200 lines of code, in deeply nested subdirectories. I wanted to find where the JavaScript engine was, and where the DOM implementation was located, and I couldn't easily find it, even using the GitHub search feature. I'm not exactly sure what this browser implements and how. Even their README is kind of crappy. Ideally y…

So the chain of events here is: copy existing tutorials and public/available code, train the model to spit it out-ish when asked, a mature-ish specification is used, and now they jitter and jumble towards a facsimile of a junior copy paste outsourcing nightmare they can’t maintain (creating exciting liabilities for all parties involved).

I can’t shake the feeling that simply being a shameless about copy-paste (ie copyright infringement), would let existing tools do much the same faster and more efficiently. Download Chromium, search-replace ‘Google’ with ‘ME!’, run Make… if I put that in a small app someone would explain that’s actually solvable as a bash one-liner.

There’s a lot of utility in better search and natural language interactions. The siren call of feedback loops plays with our sense of time and might be clouding or sense of progress and utility.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#89

Post by torginus »

xmprt wrote: post #12
cheevly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2029? I have no idea why you would think this is so far off. More like Q2 2026.

You're either overestimating the capabilities of current AI models or underestimating the complexity of building a web browser. There are tons of tiny edge cases and standards to comply with where implementing one standard will break 3 others if not done carefully. AI can't do that right now.

Even if AI will not achieve the ability to perform at this level on its own, it clearly is going to be an enormous force multiplier, allowing highly skilled devs to tackle huge projects more or less on their own.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#90

Post by hahahahhaah »

simonw wrote: post #3

"To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch." I shared my LLM predictions last week, and one of them was that by 2029 "Someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and it won’t even be a surprise" https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-202... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDhQMiAbR8&t=3913s This project from Cursor is the s…

Web browser should be easy as source exists. Fix all SVG bugs in my browser tho...
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