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Scaling long-running autonomous coding

cursor.com

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Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#131

Post by dust42 »

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…

> This is going to sound sarcastic, but I mean this fully: why haven't they merged that PR.

I would go even further, why have they not created at least one less complex project that is working and ready to be checked out? To me it sounds like having a carrot dangle in front of the face of VC investors: 'Look, we are almost there to replace legions of software developers! Imagine the market size and potential cost reductions for companies.'

LLMs are definitely an exciting new tool and they are going to change a lot. But are they worth $B for everything being stamped 'AI'? The future will tell. Looking back the dotcom boom hype felt exactly the same.

The difference with the dotcom boom is that at the time there was a lot more optimism to build a better future. The AI gold rush seems to be focused on getting giga-rich while fscking the bigger part of humanity.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#132

Post by afishhh »

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…

> The other is this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1q4xfm0/over_chr...

I took a 5-minute look at the layout crate here and... it doesn't look great:

1. Line height calculation is suspicious, the structure of the implementation also suggests inline spans aren't handled remotely correctly

2. Uhm... where is the bidi? Directionality has far reaching implications on an inline layout engine's design. This is not it.

3. It doesn't even consider itself a real engine:

        // Estimate text width (rough approximation: 0.6 * font_size * char_count)
        // In a real implementation, this would use font metrics
        let char_count = text.chars().count() as f32;
        let avg_char_width = font_size * 0.5; // Approximate average character width
        let text_width = char_count * avg_char_width;
I won't even begin talking about how this particular aspect that it "approximates" also has far reaching implications on your design...

I could probably go on in perpetuity about the things wrong with this, even test it myself or something. But that's a waste of time I'm not undertaking.

Making a "browser" that renders a few particular web pages "correctly" is an order of magnitude easier than a browser that also actually cares about standards.

If this is how "A Browser for the modern age." looks then I want a time machine.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#133

Post by Havoc »

> long running

I really dislike this as a measure. A LLM on CPU is also long running cause it’s slow.

I get what it’s meant to convey but time is such a terrible measure of anything if tk/s isn’t static

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#134

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

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…

To steelman the vibecoders’ perspective, I think the point is that the code is not meant for you to read.

Anyone who has looked at AI art, read AI stories, listened to AI music, or really interacted with AI in any meaningfully critical way would recognize that this was the only predictable result given the current state of AI generated “content”. It’s extremely brittle, and collapses at the smallest bit of scrutiny.

But I guess (to continue steelmanning) the paradigm has shifted entirely. Why do we even need an entire browser for the whole internet? Why can’t we just vibe code a “browser” on demand for each web page we interact with?

I feel gross after writing this.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#135

Post by jcfrei »

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…

Surely a smart implementation would just find the chromium source on github, do some cosmetic rewrites and strip out all none-essential features?

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#137

Post by embedding-shape »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #134
snek_case wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To steelman the vibecoders’ perspective, I think the point is that the code is not meant for you to read. Anyone who has looked at AI art, read AI stories, listened to AI music, or really interacted with AI in any meaningfully critical way would recognize that this was the only predictable result given the current state of AI generated “content”. It’s extremely brittle, and collapses at the smallest bit of scrutiny.…

If it's not meant to be read, and not meant to be run since it doesn't compile and doesn't seem like it's been able to for quite some time, what is this mean to demonstrate?

That agents can write a bunch of code by themselves? We already knew that, and what's even the point of that if the code doesn't work?

I feel like I'm still missing what this entire project and blogpost is about. Is it supposed to be all theoretical or what's the deal?

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