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Scaling long-running autonomous coding

cursor.com

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Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#71
all these focus on long running agents without focussing on core restructure is baffling. the immediate need is to break down complex tasks into smaller ones and single shot them with some amount of parallelism. imo - we need an opinionated system but with human in the middle and then think about dreamy next steps. we need to focus on groundedness first instead of worrying about agent conjuring something from thin air. the decision to leap frog into automated long running agents is quite baffling.

boys are trying to single shot a browser when a moderate complex task can derail a repo. there’s no good amount of info which might be deliberate but from what i can pick, their value add was “distributed computing and organisational design” but that too they simplified. i agree that simplicity is always the first option but flat filesystem structure without standards will not work. period.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#73
post #9
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…

2029? I have no idea why you would think this is so far off. More like Q2 2026.

You should make your own predictions, and then we can do a retrospective on who was right.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#74

all these focus on long running agents without focussing on core restructure is baffling. the immediate need is to break down complex tasks into smaller ones and single shot them with some amount of parallelism. imo - we need an opinionated system but with human in the middle and then think about dreamy next steps. we need to focus on groundedness first instead of worrying about agent conjuring something from thin ai…

I would agree with this. There are definite challenges in grounded specifications today and the tendency for an LLM to go in tangents that is still a struggle that we all deal with every day.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#75

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.

You can use hooks to keep them from being able to do this btw

I generally think of needing hooks as being a model training issue - I've had to use them less as the models have gotten smarter, hopefully we'll reach the point where they're a nice bonus instead of needed to prevent pathological model behavior.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#76
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2029? I have no idea why you would think this is so far off. More like Q2 2026.

Web browsers are insanely hard to get right, that’s why there are only ~3 decent implementations out there currently.

The one nice thing about web browsers is that they have a reasonably formalized specification set and a huge array of tests that can be used. So this makes them a fairly unique proposition ideally suited to AI construction.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#77

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…

You are doing it wrong.

Take a screenshot and take it to your manager / investor and make a presentation “Imagine what is now possible for our business”.

Get promoted / exit, move to other pastures and let them figure it out.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#79

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…

Of 63295 workflow runs, apparently only 1426 have been successful.

It's hard to avoid the impression that this is an unverified pile of slop that may have actually never worked.

The CI process certainly hasn't succeeded for the vast majority of commits.

Baffling, really.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#80
post #16

Define "from scratch" in "building a web browser from scratch". This thing has over 100 crates as dependencies... To implement css layouting, it uses Taffy, a crate used by existing browser implementations...

And it's not necessarily a bad move to use all those dependencies, but you're right it makes the claim shady.

I can create a web browser in under a minute in Copilot if I ask it to build a WinForms project that embeds the WebView2 "Edge" component and just adds an address bar and a back button.

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