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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

#91

Post by pera »

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.

> I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.

I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law

And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226

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

#92

Post by antonvs »

Fervicus wrote: post #53
antonvs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's one of the real takeaways from this. This will improve over time. People seem to get so put off by hype that they forget there can be things of real significance underneath it. You could make a long list of what's amazing and promising about this "implement a browser" task, despite all its shortcomings.

So grifting is okay, just because someday the grift might come true?

Meh. What do you think the grift is here exactly? No one’s trying to sell the newly minted source code to a web browser.

If this is the first time you’ve encountered a hype bubble, it’s a good opportunity to learn so that you can navigate the next one more easily.

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

#93

Post by cedws »

Veserv wrote: post #80
jihadjihad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is insane. I really thought we had made progress stamping out the idea that more LOC == better software, and this just flies in the face of that. I was in a meeting recently where a director lauded Claude for writing "tens of thousands of lines of code in a day", as if that metric in and of itself was worth something. And don't even get me started on "What percentage of your code is written by AI?"

As Dijkstra once opined in 1988: "My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."

In an adage: code is a liability, not an asset.

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

#94

Post by simonw »

sensanaty wrote: post #90
simonw wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part of their CEO saying "It kind of works" are you interpreting as "trying to get people to believe that it’s a working browser"? The reason I won't let this one go is that I genuinely believe people are being unfair to the engineer who built this, because some people will jump on ANY opportunity to "debunk" stories about AI. I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn'…

> "It kind of works" https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 A project that didn't compile at all counts as "kind of" working now? > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true. True, at least if it was a wrapper then it would actually kind of work , unlike this which is the most obvious case of hyping lies up for investors I've witnessed in the last... Well,…

It did compile. It just didn't compile in GitHub Actions CI, since that wasn't correctly configured.

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

#95

Post by dispersed »

simonw wrote: post #94
sensanaty wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It kind of works" https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 A project that didn't compile at all counts as "kind of" working now? > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true. True, at least if it was a wrapper then it would actually kind of work , unlike this which is the most obvious case of hyping lies up for investors I've witnessed in the last... Well,…

It did compile. It just didn't compile in GitHub Actions CI, since that wasn't correctly configured.

The linked GitHub issue has quotes from multiple people who were not able to compile it locally, not just in CI.

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

#97

Post by dns_snek »

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…

> I think the people making out that Cursor massively and dishonestly over-hyped this are arguing with a straw man version of what the company representatives actually said.

It's far more dishonest to search for contrived interpretations of their statements in an attempt to frame them as "mostly accurate" when their statements are clearly misleading (and in my opinion, intentionally so).

You're giving them infinite benefit of the doubt where they deserve none, as this industry is well known for intentionally misleading statements, you're brushing off serious factual misrepresentations as simple "lack of nuance" and finally trying to discredit people who have an issue with all of this.

With all due respect, that's not the behavior of a neutral reporter but someone who's heavily invested in maintaining a certain narrative.

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

#98

Post by simonw »

cfreksen wrote: post #63
simonw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

Yes, it depends on cssparser and html5ever from Servo, and also uses Taffy which is a dependency shared with Servo.

I do not think that makes it a "Servo wrapper", because calling it that implies it has no rendering code of its own.

It has plenty of rendering code of its own, that's why the rendered pages are slow and have visual glitches you wouldn't get with Sero!

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

#99

Post by Veserv »

simonw wrote: post #83
Veserv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did not compile [1], so your belief was correct. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649046

It did compile - the coding agents were compiling it constantly. It didn't have correctly configured GitHub Actions so the CI build was broken.

Then you should have no difficulty providing evidence for your claim. Since you have been engaging in language lawyering in this thread, it is only fair your evidence be held up to the same standard and must be incontrovertible evidence for your claims with zero wiggle room.

Even though I have no burden of proof to debunk your claims as you have provided no evidence for your claims, I will point out that another commenter [1] indicates there were build errors. And the developer agrees there were build errors [2] that they resolved.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46627675

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650998

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

#100

Post by simonw »

Veserv wrote: post #99
simonw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did compile - the coding agents were compiling it constantly. It didn't have correctly configured GitHub Actions so the CI build was broken.

Then you should have no difficulty providing evidence for your claim. Since you have been engaging in language lawyering in this thread, it is only fair your evidence be held up to the same standard and must be incontrovertible evidence for your claims with zero wiggle room. Even though I have no burden of proof to debunk your claims as you have provided no evidence for your claims, I will point out that another comm…

I mean I interviewed the engineer for 47 minutes and asked him about this and many other things directly. I think I've done enough homework on this one.

I take back the implication I inadvertently made here that it compiled cleanly the whole time - I know that's not the case, we discussed that in our interview: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/fastrender/#intermitte...

I'm frustrated at how many people are carrying around a mental model that the project "didn't even compile" implying the code had never successfully compiled, which clearly isn't true.

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