Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 145 posts

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

#111

Post by throwerxyz »

jihadjihad wrote: post #11
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?"

"What percentage of your code is written by AI?"

"I don't know, what percentage of your sweater is polyester?"

"I don't know, I think it's all cotton, why do you ask me such a random question?"

"Well surely you know that polyester can be made far cheaper in a plastics factory than cotton? Why do you use cotton?"

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

#112

Post by thmlbvf »

simonw wrote: post #94
sensanaty wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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,…

It did compile. It just didn't compile in GitHub Actions CI, since that wasn't correctly configured.

It’s been fascinating, watching you go from someone who I could always turn into more sensible opinion about technology for the last 15 years, to a sellout whose every message drips with motivated reasoning.

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

#113

Post by giantrobot »

pessimizer wrote: post #48

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 way…

Unfortunately management is the audience for AI fluff stories. Management then fires a huge percentage of their staff on the promise AI will write everything.

It doesn't matter to the people that were fired that the AI isn't as capable as promised. They're still job hunting in a shitty job market. When management does eventually figure out the AI underperforms they'll hire back staff at a fraction of the salary.

So executives and management look great no matter what and everyone else gets screwed.

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

#114

Post by simonw »

thmlbvf wrote: post #112
simonw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did compile. It just didn't compile in GitHub Actions CI, since that wasn't correctly configured.

It’s been fascinating, watching you go from someone who I could always turn into more sensible opinion about technology for the last 15 years, to a sellout whose every message drips with motivated reasoning.

I feel like I spend way too much of my time arguing back against motivated reasoning from people.

"This project is junk that doesn't even compile", for example.

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

#115

Post by MattGrommes »

MrGilbert wrote: post #8

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 pour…

In blacksmithing there's the concept of an "anvil shaped object". That is, something that looks like an anvil but is hollow or made of ceramic or something. It might stand up to tapping on for making jewelry or something but should never be worked like a real anvil for fear of hurting someone or wrecking the thing you're working on when it breaks.

I feel like a lot of the AI articles and experiments like this one are producing "app shaped objects" that look okay for making content (and indeed are fine for making earrings) but fall apart when pounded on by the real world.

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

#116

Post by nunez »

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's only impressive if you've ever only saw code as a means to an end and SLOC never really mattered.

If you write code in any capacity, you'll know that high LOC counts are usually a sign of a bad time, browsers and operating systems aside.

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

#117

Post by dminik »

simonw wrote: post #40
tyre wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 m…

According to the twitter analytics you can see on the post (at least on nitter), the original

> We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

tweet was seen by over 6 million people.

The follow up tweet which includes the link to the actual details was seen by less than 200000.

That's just how Twitter engagement works and these companies know it. Over 6 million people were fed bullshit. I'm sorry, but it's actually a great example of CEOs over hyping their products.

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

#118

Post by simonw »

dminik wrote: post #117
simonw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

According to the twitter analytics you can see on the post (at least on nitter), the original > We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week. tweet was seen by over 6 million people. The follow up tweet which includes the link to the actual details was seen by less than 200000. That's just how Twitter engagement works and these companies know it. Over 6 million people were fed bullshit…

That Tweet that was seen by 6 million people is here: https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552

You only quoted the first line. The full tweet includes the crucial "it kind of works" line - that's not in the follow-up tweet, it's in the original.

Here's that first tweet in full:

> 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.

The second tweet, with only 225,000 views, was just the following text and a link to the GitHub repository:

> Excited to continue stress testing the boundaries of coding agents and report back on what we learn.

> Code here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender

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

#119

Post by jamesfinlayson »

brokencode wrote: post #65
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.

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.

Oh yeah. At a previous job there was a guy who'd deleted more code than he'd written which I always found a little amusing.

Being in a similar position to him now though... if it can be deleted it gets deleted.

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

#120

Post by jamesfinlayson »

Sharlin wrote: post #12
chankstein38 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I would have thought 3 million lines for a fully functional browser is a little lean, though I imagine that Chrome and Firefox have probably reinvented some STL stuff over the years (for performance) which would bulk it out.
Post reply on HN