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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

#61

Post by square_usual »

mjr00 wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't think that's the case. The claims they made really weren't that extreme. In the blog post they said: > To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code across 1,000 files. You can explore the source code on GitHub. > Despite the codebase size, new agents can still understand it and make m…

What people take issue with is the claim that agents built a web browser "from scratch" only to find by looking deeper that they were using Servo, WGPU, Taffy, winit, and other libraries which do most of the heavy lifting. It's like claiming "my dog filed my taxes for me!" when in reality everything was filled out in TurboTax and your dog clicked the final submit button. Technically true, but clearly disingenuous. I'…

Did you read the comment that started this thread? Let me repeat that, ICYMI:

> "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 didn't use Servo, and it wasn't just calling dependencies. It was terribly slow and stupid, but your comment is more of a mischaracterization than anything the Cursor people have said.

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

#62

Post by simonw »

mjr00 wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't think that's the case. The claims they made really weren't that extreme. In the blog post they said: > To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code across 1,000 files. You can explore the source code on GitHub. > Despite the codebase size, new agents can still understand it and make m…

What people take issue with is the claim that agents built a web browser "from scratch" only to find by looking deeper that they were using Servo, WGPU, Taffy, winit, and other libraries which do most of the heavy lifting. It's like claiming "my dog filed my taxes for me!" when in reality everything was filled out in TurboTax and your dog clicked the final submit button. Technically true, but clearly disingenuous. I'…

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.

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

#63

Post by cfreksen »

simonw wrote: post #27
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.

It didn't have Servo as a dependency. Take a look in the Cargo.toml: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e...

I haven't really looked at the fastrender project to say how much of a browser it implements itself, but it does depend on at least one servo crate: cssparser (https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser).

Maybe there is a main servo crate as well out there, and fastrender doesn't depend on that crate, but at least in my mind fastrender depends on some servo browser functionality.

EDIT: fastrender also includes the servo HTML parser: html5ever (https://github.com/servo/html5ever).

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

#64

Post by testdelacc1 »

simonw wrote: post #40
tyre wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish your recent interview had pushed much harder on this. It came across as politely not wanting to bring up how poorly this really went, even for what the engineer intended. They were making claims without the level of rigor to back them up. There was an opportunity to learn some difficult lessons, but—and I don’t think this was your intention—it came across to me as kind of access journalism; not wanting to step…

I just don't think that's the case. The claims they made really weren't that extreme. In the blog post they said: > To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code across 1,000 files. You can explore the source code on GitHub. > Despite the codebase size, new agents can still understand it and make m…

The fact that the codebase is meaningless drivel has already been established, you don’t need to defend them. It’s just pure slop, and they’re trying to get people to believe that it’s a working browser. At the time he bragged about that `cargo build` didn’t even run! It was completely broken going back a hundred commits. So it was a complete lie to claim that it “kind of works”.

You have a reputation. You don’t need to carry water for people who are misleading people to raise VC money. What’s the point of you language lawyering about the precise meaning of what he said?

“No no, you don’t get it guys. I’m technically right if you look at the precise wording” is the kind of silly thing I do all the time. It’s not that important to be technically right. Let this one go.

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

#65

Post by brokencode »

Sharlin wrote: post #3

I’m super impressed by how "zillions of lines of code" got re-branded as a reasonable metric by which to measure code, just because it sounds impressive to laypeople and incidentally happens to be the only thing LLMs are good at optimizing.

Every line of code is technical debt. Some of the hardest projects I’ve ever worked on involved deleting as much code as I wrote.

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

#66

Post by simonw »

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

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

#67

Post by redox99 »

People thinking this does not matter just because the code is awful, it used dependencies, or whatever, are missing the point.

6 months ago with previous models this was absolutely impossible. One of the biggest limitations of LLMs is their difficulty with long tasks. This has been steadily improving and this experiment was just another milestone. It will be interesting a year from now to test how much better new models fare at this task.

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

#68

Post by mjr00 »

simonw wrote: post #62
mjr00 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people take issue with is the claim that agents built a web browser "from scratch" only to find by looking deeper that they were using Servo, WGPU, Taffy, winit, and other libraries which do most of the heavy lifting. It's like claiming "my dog filed my taxes for me!" when in reality everything was filled out in TurboTax and your dog clicked the final submit button. Technically true, but clearly disingenuous. I'…

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.

> But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth.

Well, yes and no; we live in an era where people consume headlines, not articles, and certainly not links to Github repositories in articles. If VCs and other CEOs read the headline "Cursor Agents Autonomously Create Web Browser From Scratch" on LinkedIn, the project has served its purpose and it really doesn't matter if the code compiles or not.

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

#69

Post by Fervicus »

simonw wrote: post #62
mjr00 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people take issue with is the claim that agents built a web browser "from scratch" only to find by looking deeper that they were using Servo, WGPU, Taffy, winit, and other libraries which do most of the heavy lifting. It's like claiming "my dog filed my taxes for me!" when in reality everything was filled out in TurboTax and your dog clicked the final submit button. Technically true, but clearly disingenuous. I'…

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.

How many non developers were going to look at that? They knew exactly what they were doing by saying that.

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

#70

Post by mschuster91 »

josefritzishere wrote: post #17
Sharlin wrote: post #3

I’m super impressed by how "zillions of lines of code" got re-branded as a reasonable metric by which to measure code, just because it sounds impressive to laypeople and incidentally happens to be the only thing LLMs are good at optimizing.

KPIs are slowly destroying the American economy. The idea that everything can be easily measured meaningfully with simple metrics by laypeople is a myth propagated by overpaid business consultante. It's absurd and facetious. Every attempt to do so is degrading and counter-productive.

The problem is that Western societies shifted into a "zero trust" mode - on all levels. It begins with something like being able to leave your house door unlocked after going for work to that not being reasonable due to thefts and vandalism, and it ends with insane amounts of "dumb capital" being flushed into public companies by ETFs and other investment vehicles.

And the latter is what's driving the push for KPIs the most - "active" ETFs already were bad enough because their managers would ask the companies they invested in to provide easily-to-grok KPIs (so that they could keep more of the yearly fee instead of having to pay analysts to dig down into a company's finances), and passive ETFs make that even worse because there is now barely any margin left to pay for more than a cursory review.

America's desire for stock-based pensions is frying the world's economy with its second and third order effects. Unfortunately, that rotten system will most probably only collapse when I'm already dead, so there is zero chance for most people alive today to ever see a world free of this BS.

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