When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#2I 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.
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#3I’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.
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#4I 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.
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.
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#5I 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.
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.
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#6I 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.
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.
lmao okay, touché. I did not realize it had servo as a dependency.
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#7I’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.
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.
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#8I 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!"
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#9I’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.
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.
Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
#10I 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.
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.