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Scaling long-running autonomous coding

cursor.com

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Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#171

Post by cawksuwcka »

cawksuwcka wrote: post #170

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?…

perhaps ai is a human based solution thus it’s limitations? further, it’s a human problem so we can only solve it in a human way? can we not escape our damned humanity?

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#174

Post by measurablefunc »

random_mutex wrote: post #172
measurablefunc wrote: post #72

All of these things have readily available analogues on the web which means they are more than likely just laundering open source code & claiming victory.

It doesn't compile so no victory

Just the usual corporate marketing & hype.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#175

Post by tired_and_awake »

icedchai wrote: post #167
tired_and_awake wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel for you. Hopefully your colleagues come around and realize that if they submit the code they are responsible for the slop.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#176

Post by logicallee »

PaulHoule wrote: post #162
afishhh wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 part…

Thank you for the detailed feedback, though we would prefer for you to comment on the announcement threads where you see it. We really appreciate the feedback.

You're referring to State of Utopia's[1] web browser, currently available here:

https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/172toy-browser.py.t... (turn the volume down if you play the included easter egg mini-game as it's very loud.)

10-minute livestream demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xdIMmrLMLo&t=45s

That livestream demonstration is side-by-side with Chrome, rendering very simple pages.

It compiles, renders simple web pages and is able to post.

The differences between cursor's browser and our browser:

    - Cursor's long-running autonomously coded browser: over a million lines of code and a trillion tokens, which is computationally intensive and has a high cost.
    - State of Utopia's browser: under 3000 lines of code.

    - Cursor's browser: does not compile at present.  There's no way to use it.
    - State of Utopia's browser: compiles in every version.  You can use it right away, and it includes a fun easter-egg game.

    - Cursor's browser: can't make form submissions
    - State of Utopia's browser: can make form submissions.
I'm submitting this using that browser. (I don't know if it will really post or not.)

We are taking feature requests!! Submit your requested feature here:

https://pollunit.com/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g

We are happy to put any feature you want into the web browser.

[1] will be available at https://stateofutopia.com or https://stofut.com for short (St. of Ut.)

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#177

Post by troupo »

simonw wrote: post #164
carlesonielfa wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thes…

> 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.

They generate a statistically appropriate token based on a very small context window. And they are slightly nerfed not to reproduce everything verbatim because that would bring all sorts of lawsuits.

Of course they are not reproducing Webkit or Blink or Firefox verbatim. However, it's not an "independent implementation". That's why it's "stringing together a bunch of open-source components": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649586

Edit: also, this "independent implementation" cannot be compiled by their own CI and doesn't work, apparently.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#178

Post by wilsonzlin »

tehsauce wrote: post #69

I was excited to try it out so I downloaded the repo and ran the build. However there were 100+ compilation errors. So I checked the commit history on github and saw that for at least several pages back all recent commits had failed in the CI. It was not clear which commit I should pick to get the semi-working version advertised. I started looking in the Cargo.toml to at least get an idea how the project was construc…

Thanks for the feedback. There were some build errors which have now been resolved; the CI test that was failing was not a standard check CI, and it's now been updated. Let me know if you have any further issues.

> On twitter their CEO explicitly stated that it uses a "custom js vm" which seemed particularly misleading / untrue to me.

The JS engine used a custom JS VM being developed in vendor/ecma-rs as part of the browser, which is a copy of my personal JS parser project vendored to make it easier to commit to.

I agree that for some core engine components, it should not be simply pulling in dependencies. I've begun the process of removing many of these and co-developing them within the repo alongside the browser. A reasonable goal for "from scratch" may be "if other major browsers use a dependency, it's fine to do so too". For example: OpenSSL, libpng, HarfBuzz, Skia. The current project can be moved more towards this direction, although I think using libraries for general infra that most software use (e.g. windowing) can be compatible with that goal.

I'd push back on the idea that all the agents did was wire up dependencies — the JS VM, DOM, paint systems, chrome, text pipeline, are all being developed as part of this project, and there are real complex systems being engineered towards the goal of a browser engine, even if not there yet.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#179

Post by fwip »

wilsonzlin wrote: post #178
tehsauce wrote: post #69

I was excited to try it out so I downloaded the repo and ran the build. However there were 100+ compilation errors. So I checked the commit history on github and saw that for at least several pages back all recent commits had failed in the CI. It was not clear which commit I should pick to get the semi-working version advertised. I started looking in the Cargo.toml to at least get an idea how the project was construc…

Thanks for the feedback. There were some build errors which have now been resolved; the CI test that was failing was not a standard check CI, and it's now been updated. Let me know if you have any further issues. > On twitter their CEO explicitly stated that it uses a "custom js vm" which seemed particularly misleading / untrue to me. The JS engine used a custom JS VM being developed in vendor/ecma-rs as part of the…

When you say "have now been resolved" - did the AI agent resolve it autonomously, did you direct it to, or did a human do it?

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#180

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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