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Scaling long-running autonomous coding

cursor.com

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Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#161

Post by micimize »

ianbutler wrote: post #58
jaggederest wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very interesting the degree to which coding agents completely ignore warnings. When I program I generally target warning-free code, and even with significant effort in prompting, I haven't found a model that treats warnings as errors, and they almost all love the "ignore this warning" pragmas or comments over actually fixing them.

Yeah I've had problems with this recently. "Oh those are just warnings." Yes but leaving them will make this codebase shit in short time. I do use AI heavily so I resorted to actually turning on warnings as errors in the rust codebases I work in.

Easiest to have different agents or turns that set aside the top-level goal via hooks/skills/manual prompt/etc. Heuristically, a human will likely ignore a lot of warnings until they've wired up the core logic, then go back and re-evaluate, but we still have to apply steering to get that kind of higher-order cognitive pattern.

Product is still fairly beta, but in Sculptor[^1] we have an MCP that provides agent & human with suggestions along the lines of "the agent didn't actually integrate the new module" or "the agent didn't actually run the tests after writing them." It leads to some interesting observations & challenges - the agents still really like ignoring tool calls compared to human messages b/c they "know better" (and sometimes they do).

[^]: https://imbue.com/sculptor/

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#162

Post by PaulHoule »

afishhh wrote: post #132
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. Thi…

I saw a "web browser" that was AI generated in maybe 2k lines of python based on tkinter that tried to support CSS and probably was able to render some test cases but didn't at all have the shape of a real web browser.

It reminds of having AI write me an MUI component the other day that implemented the "sx" prop [1] with some code that handles all the individual properties that were used by the component in that particular application, it might have been correct, the component at all was successful and well coded... but MUI provides a styled() function and a component, either one of which could have been used to make this component handle all the properties that "sx" is supposed to handle with as little as one line of code. I asked the agent "how would I do this using the tools that MUI provides to support sx" and had a great conversation and got a complete and clear understanding about the right way to do it but on the first try it wrote something crazy overcomplicated to handle the specific case as opposed to a general-purpose solution that was radically simple. That "web browser" was all like that.

[1] you can write something like sx={width: 4} and MUI multiplies 4 by the application scale and puts on, say, a width: 20px style

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#163

Post by idopmstuff »

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'm not sure the approach of "completely autonomous coding" is the right way to go.

I suspect the author of the post would agree. This feels much more like a experiment to push the limits of LLMs than anything they're looking to seriously use as a product (or even the basis of a product).

I think the more interesting question is when the approach of completely autonomous coding will be the right way to go. LLMs are definitely progressing along a spectrum of: Can't do it -> Can do it with help -> Can do it alone but code isn't great -> Can do it alone with good code. Right now I'd say they're only in that final step for very small projects (e.g. simple Python scripts), but it seems like an inevitability that they will get there for increasingly large ones.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#164

Post by simonw »

carlesonielfa wrote: post #160
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…

Its impressive, but how sure are we that the code for the current open source browsers isn't part of the model's training data?

It turns out the Cursor one is stitching together a ton of open source components already.

That said, I don't really find the critique that models have browser source code in their training data particularly interesting.

If they spat out a full, working implementation in response to a single prompt then sure, I'd be suspicious they were just regurgitating their training data.

But if you watch the transcripts for these kinds of projects you'll see them make thousands of independent changes, reacting to test failures and iterating towards an implementation that matches the overall goals of the project.

The fact that Firefox and Chrome and WebKit are likely buried in the training data somewhere might help them a bit, but it still looks to me more like an independent implementation that's influenced by those and many other sources.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#165

Post by tired_and_awake »

icedchai wrote: post #67
tired_and_awake wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this misses the point, see the other comments. Fully scaled agentic coding replaces managers too :) cause for celebration all around

I don't believe that. If you go fully agentic and you don't understand the output, you become the manager. You're in no better position than the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.

Hey just wanted to thank you for the healthy back and forth! I respect your opinion and don't hold mine strongly. That said I'm eager for this space to mature and for us all to figure out the best way to interact with fault prone code generation tooling... Especially at scale where we all have the hardest time navigating complexity.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#166

Post by mrefish »

embedding-shape wrote: post #110
mrefish wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to raise the bar. By 2029 someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and the surprise is that it was designed to be used by pelicans.

> Time to raise the bar Lets make someone pass the one we have, this experiment didn't seem to yield a functioning browser, why would we raise the bar?

> why would we raise the bar?

The web needs to be more p5n friendly.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#167

Post by icedchai »

tired_and_awake wrote: post #165
icedchai wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that. If you go fully agentic and you don't understand the output, you become the manager. You're in no better position than the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.

Hey just wanted to thank you for the healthy back and forth! I respect your opinion and don't hold mine strongly. That said I'm eager for this space to mature and for us all to figure out the best way to interact with fault prone code generation tooling... Especially at scale where we all have the hardest time navigating complexity.

Thanks. It's fun chatting about this stuff! I don't hold mine strongly, either, though I am dealing with lots of AI generated slop code from others.

Interesting times ahead.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#168

Post by z_zetetic_z »

mdswanson wrote: post #56

Over the past year or so, I've built my own system of agents that behaves almost exactly like this. I can describe what I'd like built before I go to bed and have a fantastic foundation in place by the next day. For simpler projects, they'll be complete. Because of the reviews, the code continually improves until the agents are satisfied. I'm impressed every time.

Any chance you would care to share more about this?

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#170

Post by cawksuwcka »

would really appreciate some elaboration as they gloss over the most important part in my kind. why can’t one agent just do it. that’s what ai seems to be - an amalgamation of all our knowledge. why split it back up into separate tentacles. i think focus should be on letting it envelop the problem like a fog and swallow it whole, instead of molesting it independently at touch points and reporting back to … the brain? it’s pretty ridiculous actually. just mimicking ourselves yet again.
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