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When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

theregister.com

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Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#11

Post by jihadjihad »

Sharlin wrote: post #3

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.

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?"

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#12

Post by Sharlin »

chankstein38 wrote: post #9
Sharlin wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#13

Post by atrettel »

Sharlin wrote: post #3

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.

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

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#15

Post by [deleted] »

jey wrote: post #2

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.

[deleted]

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#17

Post by josefritzishere »

Sharlin wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#18

Post by jazzyjackson »

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

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#20

Post by simonw »

> 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.

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