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

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

#121

Post by rsynnott »

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.

> I think it was to show just how far the tools have come.

In… terms of sheer volume of production of useless crap?

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

#122

Post by GoatInGrey »

square_usual wrote: post #58
moomoo11 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would he push back? His whole schtick is to sell only AI hype. He’s not going to hurt his revenue.

That's a great way to tell on yourself that you've never read Simon's work.

On the contrary, we get to read hundreds of his comments explaining how the LLM in anecdote X didn't fail, it was the developer's fault and they should know better than to blame the LLM.

I only know this because on occasion I'll notice there was a comment from them (I only check the name of the user if it's a hot take) and I ctrl-F their username to see 20-70 matches on the same thread. Exactly 0 of those comments present the idea that LLMs are seriously flawed in programming environments regardless of who's in the driver seat. It always goes back to operator error and "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years...".

I dunno, I manage LLM implementation consulting teams and I will tell you to your face that LLMs are unequivocally shit for the majority of use cases. It's not hard to directly criticize the tech without hiding behind deflections or euphemisms.

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

#123

Post by augusteo »

The frustrating part isn't that the project failed. It's that it was marketed as a success.

I use AI coding tools daily. They're genuinely useful for real work. But stunts like this make it harder to have honest conversations about what AI can and can't do. When executives see "AI built a browser in 3 million lines," they form expectations that set everyone up for disappointment.

The gap between AI demos and AI in production is wider than most people realize. We'd all be better off if people stopped optimizing for impressiveness and started optimizing for honesty.

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

#124

Post by simonw »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #122
square_usual wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great way to tell on yourself that you've never read Simon's work.

On the contrary, we get to read hundreds of his comments explaining how the LLM in anecdote X didn't fail, it was the developer's fault and they should know better than to blame the LLM. I only know this because on occasion I'll notice there was a comment from them (I only check the name of the user if it's a hot take) and I ctrl-F their username to see 20-70 matches on the same thread. Exactly 0 of those comments pr…

> Exactly 0 of those comments present the idea that LLMs are seriously flawed in programming environments regardless of who's in the driver seat.

Why would I say that when I very genuinely believe the opposite?

LLMs are flawed in programming environments if driven by people who don't know how to use them effectively.

Learning to use them effectively is unintuitive and difficult, as I'm sure you've seen yourself.

So I try to help people learn how to use them, through articles like https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ and comments like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765460#46765940

(I don't ever say variants of "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years..." though, I think predicting future improvements is pointless when we can be focusing on what the models we have right now can do.)

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

#125

Post by cube00 »

simonw wrote: post #104
tyre wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, just to be clear, the defense that they pulled something out of their ass is that they linked to something that outed them? So they couldn't have actually have been overstating it? If anything, that proves the point that they weren't rigorous! They claimed a thing. The thing didn't accomplish what they said. I'm not saying that they hid it but that they misrepresented the thing that they built. My comment to y…

My goal in the interview was to get to as accurate a version of what they actually built and how they built it as possible. I don't think directly accusing them of being misleading about what they had done would have supported that goal, so I didn't do it. Instead I made sure to dig into things like what QuickJS was doing in there and why it used Taffy as part of the conversation.

3 days ago: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743831)

> Honestly, grilling him about what the CEO had tweeted didn't even cross my mind.

Today:

> I don't think directly accusing them of being misleading about what they had done would have supported that goal, so I didn't do it.

I find it hard to follow how it didn't cross your mind while for the same interview you had also considered the situation and determined it didn't meet the interview goal.

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

#126

Post by Fervicus »

antonvs wrote: post #92
Fervicus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So grifting is okay, just because someday the grift might come true?

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.

If you think there is no grift here, then maybe it's your first hype bubble.

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

#127

Post by simonw »

cube00 wrote: post #125
simonw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal in the interview was to get to as accurate a version of what they actually built and how they built it as possible. I don't think directly accusing them of being misleading about what they had done would have supported that goal, so I didn't do it. Instead I made sure to dig into things like what QuickJS was doing in there and why it used Taffy as part of the conversation.

3 days ago: ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743831 ) > Honestly, grilling him about what the CEO had tweeted didn't even cross my mind. Today: > I don't think directly accusing them of being misleading about what they had done would have supported that goal, so I didn't do it. I find it hard to follow how it didn't cross your mind while for the same interview you had also considered the situation and determi…

I don't think those two statements are particularly inconsistent.

It didn't cross my mind to grill him over his CEO's tweets.

I also don't think that directly accusing them of being misleading would support the goal of my interview - which was to figure out the truth of what they built and how.

If you like, I'll retract the fragment "so I didn't do it" since that implies that I thought "maybe I should grill him about what the CEO said... no actually I won't" - which isn't what happened.

So I guess you win?

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

#128

Post by moomoo11 »

square_usual wrote: post #58
moomoo11 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would he push back? His whole schtick is to sell only AI hype. He’s not going to hurt his revenue.

That's a great way to tell on yourself that you've never read Simon's work.

I literally see their posts every (other) day, and its always glazing something that doesn't fully work (but is kind of cool at a glance) or is really just hyped beyond belief.

Comments usually point out the issues or more grounded reality.

BTW I'm bullish on AI, going through 100s of millions of tokens per month.

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

#129

Post by jason_oster »

mjr00 wrote: post #4
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.

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.

`servo.render()` does not appear to exist in the code base. Would you please point it out to us?

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

#130

Post by user34283 »

simonw wrote: post #84
user34283 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

With the agent running autonomously for a long time, I'd have feared it would break my build/verification tasks in an attempt to fix something.

My confidence in running an agent unsupervised for a long time is low, but to be fair that's not something I tried. I worked mostly with the agent in the foreground, at most I had two agents running at once in Antigravity.

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