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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

#131

Post by testdelacc1 »

dispersed wrote: post #95
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.

The linked GitHub issue has quotes from multiple people who were not able to compile it locally, not just in CI.

simonw has drunk the koolaid on this one. There’s no point trying to convince him. Relatedly, he made a prediction that AI would be able to write a web browser from scratch in 3 years. He really wants to see this happen, so maybe that’s why he’s defending these scammers.

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

#132

Post by Snuggly73 »

simonw wrote: post #42
mrob wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original post claimed they were "running hundreds of concurrent agents": https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

It was 2,000 concurrent agents at peak. I'd still be surprised if that added up to "trillions" of tokens. A trillion is a very big number.

I mean, its right there in their blog - https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

"We've deployed trillions of tokens across these agents toward a single goal. The system isn't perfectly efficient, but it's far more effective than we expected."

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

#134

Post by avd201 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #49
drob518 wrote: post #19

You would think a CEO with a product that caters to developers would know that everyone was going to clone the repo and check his work. He just squandered a whole lot of credibility.

His target reader is management , not developers. Management already doesn't trust developers in any way. Why would they believe you, who are clearly just trying to save your job, over a big company who clearly is the future! Or do you trust your management to make the right decision?

Fake until you make it

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

#135

Post by nicoburns »

simonw wrote: post #87
mjr00 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right in the sense it didn't `use::servo`, merely Servo's CSS parser `cssparser`[0] and Servo's DOM parser `html5ever`[1]. Maybe that dog can do taxes after all. [0] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Awilsonzlin%2Ffastrender%2... [1] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Awilsonzlin%2Ffastrender+h...

Taffy is related to Servo too, though apparently not officially part of the Servo project - but Servo does use it. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy Used here (I think): https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/c639bb1a7b3aa0fd5e02b40d...

Servo uses Taffy for CSS Grid. It could also very easily use it for Flexbox, but they currently prefer to use their own implementation there.

It was originally a derivative of React Native's Yoga implementation of Flexbox, and is currently developed primarily as part of the Blitz engine.

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

#136

Post by embedding-shape »

cedws wrote: post #93
Veserv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Dijkstra once opined in 1988: "My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."

In an adage: code is a liability, not an asset.

As a fun exercise, I tried to see how close I could get to Cursor's results without using any Rust crates, and by making the agent actually care about the code. End results: 20K LOC for a browser that more or less works the same, on three platforms, leveraging commonly available system libraries and no 3rd party Rust crates: https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522)

I'm not entirely sure what the millions of lines of code is supposedly doing.

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

#137

Post by tempodox »

MattGrommes wrote: post #115
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…

Plus we can suspect a tremendous amount of astroturfing on this topic. When you’re spending billions on the tech, a few millions (if it even is that much) for “creative marketing” are really nothing.

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

#138

Post by franktankbank »

simonw wrote: post #66
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…

Was that a while ago? Minesweeper's pretty easy. Claude Opus 4.5: "Build minesweeper as an artifact, don't use react" (Then "Fix it to work on mobile where right click isn’t a thing") Play it here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/minesweeper Transcript here: https://claude.ai/share/2d351b62-a829-4d81-b65d-8f3b987fba23

Do you do anything to make sure you are getting the genuine experience as the regular user of these tools?

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

#139

Post by franktankbank »

hexage1814 wrote: post #16

AI will never be able to create a browser, just as AI was never able to defeat a chess grandmaster.

That's probably true but what is the point of misrepresenting it today? It's a sick society where that is a net benefit to a corp

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

#140

Post by vidarh »

pera wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation. But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth.

> I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation. I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made https://w…

I very much don't believe for a second anyone would manage to get a judgement against them on this in the UK.

For starters, the language is highly subjective, and they'd be able to show vast amounts of discourse about software engineering where "from scratch" often does not involve starting with nothing, and they'd then go on to argue that the person suing haven't actually had any reason to believe that they would be able to replicate a setup that was described as a complex large-scale experiment without much more information.

The person suing would have an uphill battle showing that whatever assumptions they made were something that was reasonable to infer based on that statement.

And to have a case, a consumer would also then need to have relied on this as a significant factor in choosing to buy their services.

But even if we assume the court would agree it is fraudulent, the remedy is only "directly consequential losses".

In other words, I doubt anyone would lose sleep over this risk.

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