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.
Scaling long-running autonomous coding
71–80 of 203 posts
Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding
#72Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding
#73"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.
Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding
#74all 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…
Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding
#75Earlier 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
Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding
#76Earlier 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.
Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding
#77I 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…
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
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
2029? I have no idea why you would think this is so far off. More like Q2 2026.
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Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding
#79I 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…
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
#80Define "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...
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.