That makes a lot of sense for massive-scale efforts like a browser, using coordinated agents to push toward a huge, well defined target with existing benchmarks and tests.
My angle has been a bit different: scaling autonomous coding for individual developers, and in a much simpler way. I love CLI agents, but I found myself wasting time babysitting terminals while waiting for turns to finish. At some point it clicked: what if I could just email them?
Email sounds backward, but that’s the feature. It’s universal, async, already collaborative. The agent sends me a focused update, I reply with guidance, and it keeps working on a server somewhere, or my laptop, while I’m not glued to my desk. There’s still a human in the loop, just without micromanagement.
It’s been surprisingly joyful and productive, and it feels closer to how real organizations already work. I’ve put together a small, usable tool around this and shared it here if anyone wants to try it or kick the tires:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629191
Time to raise the bar. By 2029 someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and the surprise is that it was designed to be used by pelicans.
There are 3.5 serious open codebases of web browsers currently. Only two are full featured. It's not nothing, but it's very far from "source exists so it's easy to copy what they do".
But detailed specs exists for both HTML and JS and tests also exists and unlimited amount of test data. You can just try running webpage or program and also have reference implementations - it's much easier for agents to understand that. Also HTML they know super well from scraping whole internet but still impressive.
You're either overestimating the capabilities of current AI models or underestimating the complexity of building a web browser. There are tons of tiny edge cases and standards to comply with where implementing one standard will break 3 others if not done carefully. AI can't do that right now.
Even if AI will not achieve the ability to perform at this level on its own, it clearly is going to be an enormous force multiplier, allowing highly skilled devs to tackle huge projects more or less on their own.
> There are tons of tiny edge cases and standards to comply with where implementing one standard will break 3 others if not done carefully. AI can't do that right now.
Firstly the CI is completely broken on every commit, all tests have failed and its and looking closely at the code, it is exactly what you expect for unmaintainable slop.
Having more lines of code is not a good measure of robust software, especially if it does not work.
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.
As far as I read on Ladybird's blog updates, the issue is less the formalised specs, and more that other browsers break the specs, so websites adjust, so you need to take the non-compliance to specs into account with your design
Did anyone manage to run the tests from the repository itself? The code seems filled with errors and warnings, as far as I can tell none of them because of the platform I'm on (Linux). I went and looked at the Action workflow history for some pages, and seems CI been failing for a while, PRs also all been failing CI but merged. How exactly was this verified to be something to be used as an successful example, or am I misunderstanding what point they are trying to make? They mention a screenshot, but they never actually mention if their goal was successfully met, do they?
I'm not sure the approach of "completely autonomous coding" is the right way to go. I feel like maybe we'll be able to use it more effectively if we think of them as something to be used by a human to accomplish some thing instead, lean into letting the human drive the thing instead, because quality spirals so quickly out of control.
I found the codebase very hard to navigate. Hundreds (over a thousand?) tiny files with less than 200 lines of code, in deeply nested subdirectories. I wanted to find where the JavaScript engine was, and where the DOM implementation was located, and I couldn't easily find it, even using the GitHub search feature. I'm not exactly sure what this browser implements and how.
Even their README is kind of crappy. Ideally you want installation instructions right near the top, but it's broken into multiple files. The README link that says "running + architecture" (but the file is actually called browser_ui.md???) is hard to follow. There is no explicit list of dependencies, and again no explanation of how JavaScript execution works, or how rendering works, really.
It's impressive that they got such a big project to be built by agents and to compile, but this codebase... Feels like AI slop, and you couldn't pay me to maintain it. You could try to get AI agents to maintain it, but my prediction is that past some scale, they would have a hard time figuring out their own mess. You would just be left with permanent bugs you can't easily fix.
So the chain of events here is: copy existing tutorials and public/available code, train the model to spit it out-ish when asked, a mature-ish specification is used, and now they jitter and jumble towards a facsimile of a junior copy paste outsourcing nightmare they can’t maintain (creating exciting liabilities for all parties involved).
I can’t shake the feeling that simply being a shameless about copy-paste (ie copyright infringement), would let existing tools do much the same faster and more efficiently. Download Chromium, search-replace ‘Google’ with ‘ME!’, run Make… if I put that in a small app someone would explain that’s actually solvable as a bash one-liner.
There’s a lot of utility in better search and natural language interactions. The siren call of feedback loops plays with our sense of time and might be clouding or sense of progress and utility.
You raise a good point, which is that autonomous coding needs to be benchmarked on designs/challenges where the exact thing being built isn't part of the model's training set.
swe-REbench does this. They gather real issues from github repos on a ~monthly basis, and test the models. On their leaderboard you can use a slider to select issues created after a model was released, and see the stats. It works for open models, a bit uncertain on closed models. Not perfect, but best we have for this idea.
> It's impressive that they got such a big project to be built by agents and to compile
But that's the thing, it doesn't compile, has a ton of errors, CI seems broken since long... What exactly is supposed to impressive here, that it managed to generate a bunch of code that doesn't even compile?
What in the holy hackers is this even about? Am I missing something obvious here? How is this news?
> Today's agents work well for focused tasks, but are slow for complex projects.
What does slow mean? Slower than humans? Need faster GPUs? What does it even imply? Too slow to produce the next token? Too slow in attempts to be usable? Need human intervention?
This piece is made and written to keep the bubble inflating further.
I have been trying Claude Code a lot this week. Two projects:
* A small statically generated Hugo website but with some clever linking/taxonomy stuff. This was a fairly self-contained project that is now 'finished' but wouldn't hvae taken me more than a few days to code up from scratch.
* A scientific simulation package, to try and do a clean refresh of an existing one which i can point at for implementation details but which has some technical problems I would like to reduce/remove.
Claude code absolutely smashed the first one - no issues at all. With the second, no matter what I tried, it just made lots of mistakes, even when I just told it to copy the problematic parts and transpose them into the new structure. It basically got to a point where it wasn't correct and it didn't seem to be able to get out of a bit of a 'doom loop' and required manual intervention, no matter how much prompting and hints I gave it.
Did sign up for Claude Code myself this week, too, given the $10/month promo.
I have experience with AI by using AWS Kiro at work and directly prompting Claude Opus for convos. After just 2 days and ~5-6 vibe coding sessions in total I got a working Life-OS-App created for my needs.
- Clone of Todoist with the features that I actually use/want. Projects, Tags, due dates, quick adding with a todoist like text-aware input (e.g. !p1, Today etc.)
- A fantastical like calendar. Again, 80% of the features I used from Fantastical
- A Habit Tracker
- A Goal Tracker (Quarterly / Yearly)
- A dashboard page showing todays summary with single click edit/complete marking
- User authentication and sharing of various features (e.g. tasks)
- Docker deployment which will eventually run on my NAS
I'm going to add a few more things and cancel quite a few subscriptions.
It one-shots all tasks within minutes. It's wild. I can code but didn't bother looking at the code myself, because ... why.
Even though do not earn US Tech money, am tempted to buy the max subscription for a month or two although the price is still hard to swallow.
Claude and vibe coding is wild.
If I can clone todoist within a few vibe coding sessions and then implement any additional/new feature I want within minutes instead proposing, praying and then waiting for months, why would I pay $$$...
This is going to sound sarcastic, but I mean this fully: why haven't they merged that PR.
The implied future here is _unreal cool_. Swarms of coding agents that can build anything, with little oversight. Long-running projects that converge on high-quality, complex projects.
But the examples feel thin. Web browsers, Excel, and Windows 7 exist, and they specifically exist in the LLM's training sets. The closest to real code is what they've done with Cursor's codebase .... but it's not merged yet.
I don't want to say, call me when it's merged. But I'm not worried about agents ability to produce millions of lines of code. I'm worried about their ability to intersect with the humans in the real world, both as users of that code and developers who want to build on top of it.
> Web browsers, Excel, and Windows 7 exist, and they specifically exist in the LLM's training sets.
There's just a bit over 3 browsers, 1 serious excel-like and small part of windows user side. That's really not enough for training for replicating those specific tasks.
This is how I think about it. I care about asymptotics. What initial conditions (model(s) x workflow/harness x input text artefacts) causes convergence to the best steady state? The number of lines of code doesn't have to grow, it could also shrink. It's about the best output.
Not everything, only code-bases of existing (open-source?) applications.
But what would be the point of re-creating existing applications? It would be useful if you can produce a better version of those applications. But the point in this experiment was to produce something "from scratch" I think. Impressive yes, but is it useful?
A more practically useful task would be for Mozilla Foundation and others to ask AI to fix all bugs in their application(s). And perhaps they are trying to do that, let's wait and see.
Re-creating closed source applications as open source would have a clear benefit because people could use those applications in a bunch of new ways. (implied: same quality bar)
You have to be careful which codebase to try this on. I have a feeling if someone unleashed agents on the Linux kernel to fix bugs it'd lead to a ban on agents there
Personally what I don't like about this now that I think about it, is that they didn't scale up gradually, let's say there there's a ladder of complexity in software, starting at a simple React CRUD app, going on to something more complex, such as a Paint clone, to something even more complex, like a file manager etc, ending up at one of the most complex pieces of software ever made, a web browser.
I'd want to see some system, that 100%s the first task, saturation, does a great job on the next, then does a valiant effort on the third, then finally makes something promising but as yet unusable on the last.
This way we could see that scaling up difficulty results in a gradual decline in quality, and could have a decent measurement of where we are at and where we are going.
> While it might seem like a simple screenshot, building a browser from scratch is extremely difficult.
> Another experiment was doing an in-place migration of Solid to React in the Cursor codebase. It took over 3 weeks with +266K/-193K edits. As we've started to test the changes, we do believe it's possible to merge this change.
In my view, this post does not go into sufficient detail or nuance to warrant any serious discussion, and the sparseness of info mostly implies failure, especially in the browser case.
It _is_ impressive that the browser repo can do _anything at all_, but if there was anything more noteworthy than that, I feel they'd go into more detail than volume metrics like 30K commits, 1M LoC. For instance, the entire capability on display could be constrained to a handful of lines that delegate to other libs.
And, it "is possible" to merge any change that avoids regressions, but the majority of our craft asks the question "Is it possible to merge _the next_ change? And the next, and the 100th?"
If they merge the MR they're walking the walk.
If they present more analysis of the browser it's worth the talk (not that useful a test if they didn't scrutinize it beyond "it renders")
Until then, it's a mountain of inscrutable agent output that manages to compile, and that contains an execution pathway which can screenshot apple.com by some undiscovered mechanism.
error: could not compile `fastrender` (lib) due to 34 previous errors; 94 warnings emitted
I guess probably at some point, something compiled, but cba to try to find that commit. I guess they should've left it in a better state before doing that blog post.
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.
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.
`cargo clippy` is also very happy with my code. I agree and I think it's kind of a tragedy, I think for production work warnings are very important. Certainly, even if you have a large number of warnings and `clippy` issues, that number ideally should go down over time, rather than up.
The lowest bar in agentic coding is the ability to create something which compiles successfully. Then something which runs successfully in the happy path. Then something which handles all the obvious edge cases.
By far the most useful metric is to have a live system running for a year with widespread usage that produces a lower number of bugs than that of a codebase created by humans.
Until that happens, my skeptic hat will remain firmly on my head.
I used similar techniques to build tjs [1] - the worlds fastest and most accurate json schema validator, with magical TypeScript types. I learned a lot about autonomous programming. I found a similar "planner/delegate" pattern to work really well, with the use of git subtrees to fan out work [2].
I think any large piece of software with well established standards and test suites will be able to be quickly rewritten and optimized by coding agents.
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 constructed. I saw there that rather than being built from scratch as the post seemed to imply that almost every core component was simply pulled in from an open source library. quickjs engine, wgpu graphics, winit windowing & input, egui for ui, html parsing, the list goes on.
On twitter their CEO explicitly stated that it uses a "custom js vm" which seemed particularly misleading / untrue to me.
Integrating all of these existing components is still super impressive for these models to do autonomously, so I'm just at a loss how to feel when it does something impressive but they then feel the need to misrepresent so much. I guess I just have a lot less respect and trust for the cursor leadership, but maybe a little relief knowing that soon I may just generate my own custom cursor!
I follow Dioxus and particularly blitz / #native on your Discord and I noticed the exact same thing too. There was a comment in a readme in Cursor's browser repo they linked mentioning taffy and I thought, hang on, it's definitely not from scratch, as they advertise. People really do believe everything they read on Twitter.
Great work by the way, blitz seems to be coming along nicely, and I even see you guys created a proto browser yourselves which is pretty cool, actually functional unlike Cursor's.
```
pub fn render_placeholder(&self, frame_id: FrameId) -> Result<FrameBuffer, String> {
let (width, height) = self.viewport_css;
let len = (width as usize)
.checked_mul(height as usize)
.and_then(|px| px.checked_mul(4))
.ok_or_else(|| "viewport size overflow".to_string())?;
if len > MAX_FRAME_BYTES {
return Err(format!(
"requested frame buffer too large: {width}x{height} => {len} bytes"
));
}
// Deterministic per-frame fill color to help catch cross-talk in tests/debugging.
let id = frame_id.0;
let url_hash = match self.navigation.as_ref() {
Some(IframeNavigation::Url(url)) => Self::url_hash(url),
Some(IframeNavigation::AboutBlank) => Self::url_hash("about:blank"),
Some(IframeNavigation::Srcdoc { content_hash }) => {
let folded = (*content_hash as u32) ^ ((*content_hash >> 32) as u32);
Self::url_hash("about:srcdoc") ^ folded
}
None => 0,
};
let r = (id as u8) ^ (url_hash as u8);
let g = ((id >> 8) as u8) ^ ((url_hash >> 8) as u8);
let b = ((id >> 16) as u8) ^ ((url_hash >> 16) as u8);
let a = 0xFF;
let mut rgba8 = vec![0u8; len];
for px in rgba8.chunks_exact_mut(4) {
px[0] = r;
px[1] = g;
px[2] = b;
px[3] = a;
}
Ok(FrameBuffer {
width,
height,
rgba8,
})
}
To be fair, that was always the case when working with external contractors. And if agentic AI companies can capture that market, then that's still a pretty massive opportunity.
Remember when 3D printers meant the death of factories? Everyone would just print what they wanted at home.
I'm very bullish on LLMs building software, but this doesn't mean the death of software products anymore than 3D printers meant the death of factories.
Perhaps, but I don't think that's a good analogy, there's too many important differences to say (3d printing : all manufacturing) : (vibe coding : all software).
The hype may be similar, if that's your point then I agree, but the weakness of 3D printing is the range of materials and the conditions needed to work with them (titanium is merely extremely difficult, but no sane government will let the general public buy tetrafluoroethylene as a feedstock), while the weakness of machine learning (even more broadly than LLMs) is the number of examples they require in order to learn stuff.
I'm kinda surprised how negative and skeptical anyone is here.
It kinda blows my mind that this is possible, to build a browser engine that approximates a somewhat working website renderer.
Even if we take the most pessimistic interpretation of events ( heavy human steering, relies on existing libraries, sloppy code quality at places, not all versions compile etc)
I'm not too surprised, the way I read a lot of (not all!*) the negative comments is ~"I'm imagining having to work with this code, I'd hate it". Even though I'm fairly impressed with the work LLMs do, this has also been my experience of them… albeit with a vibe-coding** sample size of 1, done over a few days with some spare credit.
The positive views are mostly from people who point out that what matters in the end is what the code does, not what it looks like, e.g. users don't see the code, nor do they care about the code, and that even for businesses who do care, LLMs may be the ones who have to pay down any technical debt that builds up.
* Anyone in a field where mistakes are expensive. In one project, I asked the LLM to code-review itself and it found security vulnerabilities in its own solutions. It's probably still got more I don't know about.
** In the original sense of just letting the LLM do whatever it wanted in response to the prompt, never reading or code reviewing the result myself until the end.
The problem I've had with vibe coding is akin the adage of the first 90% of the code taking 90% of the time, and the last 10% taking the other 90% of the time. The LLM can get you to 90% initially but it hits a wall unless you the user know what it's doing and outputting, but that is very difficult when you're vibe coding by its very definition, meaning that you're not looking at the code at all. And then you have to read thousands of lines of code which you don't understand that it's entirely easier to stop and hand code a new version yourself, which is precisely what I've done with some of my projects.
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.
I‘m running opus 4.5 which is arguably their best model and while it’s really good for a lot of work it always introduces subtle errors or inconsistencies when left unsupervised as prompts are never good enough to remove all ambiguity for complex asks, so I can’t imagine what it will do to a code base when left alone with it for days or weeks.
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.
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.
The moment all code is interacted with through agents I cease to care about code quality. The only thing that matters is the quality of the product, cost of maintenance etc. exactly the thing we measure software development orgs against. It could be handy to have these projects deployed to demonstrate their utility and efficacy? Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed, like who cares if agents code is hard to read if agents are managing the code base?
We don't read the binary output of our C compilers because we trust it to be correct almost every time. ("It's a compiler bug" is more of a joke than a real issue)
If AI could reach the point where we actually trusted the output, then we might stop checking it.
> "It's a compiler bug" is more of a joke than a real issue
It's a very real issue, people just seem to assume their code is wrong rather than the compiler. I've personally reported 12 GCC bugs over the last 2 years and there's 1239 open wrong-code bugs currently.
You should at least read the tests, to make sure they express your intent. Personally, I'm not going to take responsibility for a piece of code unless I've read every line of it and thought hard about whether it does what I think it does.
AI coding agents are still a huge force-multiplier if you take this approach, though.
No, it becomes only managers, because they are the ones who dictate the business needs (because otherwise, what is the software the agents are making even doing without such goals), and now even worse with non technical ones.
I don't believe that. If you go fully agentic and you don't understand the output, you become the manager. You're in no better position than the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.
You could look at agents as meta-compilers, the problem is that unlike real compilers they aren't verified in any way (neither formally or informally), in fact you never know which particular agent you're running against when you're asking for something; and unlike compilers, you don't just throw away everything and start afresh on each run. I don't think you could test a reasonably complex system to a degree where it really wouldn't matter what runs underneath, and as you're going to (probably) use other agents to write THOSE tests, what makes you certain they offer real coverage? It's turtles all the way down.
Completely agree and great points. The conclusion of "agents are writing the tests" etc is where I'm at as well. More over the code quality itself is also an agentic problem, as is compile time, reliability, portability... Turtles all the way down as you say.
All code interactions all happen through agents.
I suppose the question is if the agents only produce Swiss cheese solutions at scale and there's no way to fill in those gaps (at scale). Then yeah fully agentic coding is probably a pipe dream.
On the other hand if you can stand up a code generation machine where it's watts + Gpus + time => software products. Then well... It's only a matter of time until app stores entirely disappear or get really weird. It's hard to fathom the change that's coming to our profession in this world.
The browser it built, obviously the context window of the entire project is huge. They mention loads of parallel agents in the blog post, so I guess each agent is given a module to work on, and some tests? And then a 'manager' agent plugs this in without reading the code? Otherwise I can't see how, even with ChatGPT 5.2/Gemini 3, you could do this otherwise? In retrospect it seems an obvious approach and akin to how humans work in teams, but it's still interesting.
GPT-5.2-Codex has a 400,000 token window. Claude 4.5 Opus is half of that, 200,000 tokens.
It turns out to matter a whole lot less than you would expect. Coding Agents are really good at using grep and writing out plans to files, which means they can operate successfully against way more code than fits in their context at a single time.
The other issue with "a huge token window" is that if you fill it, it seems like relevance for any specific part of the window is diminished - which makes it hard to override default model behavior.
Interestingly, recently it seems to me like codex is actually compressing early and often so that it stays in the smarter-feeling reasoning zone of the first 1/3rd of the window, which is a neat solution for this, albeit with the caveat of post-compression behavior differences cropping up more often.
Get a good "project manager" agents.md and it changes the whole approach of vibe coding. For a professional environment, with each person given a little domain, arranged in the usual hierarchy of your coding team, truly amazing things can get done.
Presumably the security and validation of code still needs work, I haven't read anything that indicates those are solved yet, so people still need to read and understand the code, but we're at the "can do massive projects that work" stage.
Division of labor and planning and hierarchy are all rapidly advancing, the orchestration and coordination capabilities are going to explode in '26.
> We initially built an integrator role for quality control and conflict resolution, but found it created more bottlenecks than it solved
Of course it creates bottlenecks, since code quality takes time and people don’t get it right on the first try when the changes are complex. I could also be faster if I pushed directly to prod!
Don’t get me wrong. I use these tools, and I can see the productivity gains. But I also believe the only way to achieve the results they show is to sacrifice quality, because no software engineer can review the changes at the same speed the agent generates code. They may solve that problem, or maybe the industry will change so only output and LOC matter, but until then I will keep cursing the agent until I get the result I want.
I've always liked the idea of intelligence in the autonomous ships of the Revelation Space universe. Little agents reporting to progressively more intelligent and higher level ones.
It’s fascinating that many of the issues they faced I’ve seen in human software engineering teams.
Things like integration creating bottlenecks or a lack of consistent top down direction leading to small risk adverse changes instead of bold redesigns. All things I’ve seen before.
Over the past year or so, I've built my own system of agents that behaves almost exactly like this. I can describe what I'd like built before I go to bed and have a fantastic foundation in place by the next day. For simpler projects, they'll be complete. Because of the reviews, the code continually improves until the agents are satisfied. I'm impressed every time.
Supposing agents and their organization improve, it seems like we’re approaching a point where the cost of a piece of software will be driven down to the cost of running the hardware, and the cost of the tokens required to replicate it.
The tokens were “expensive” from the minds of humans …
It will be driven down to the cost of having a good project and product manager effectively understanding what the customer wants, which has been the main barrier to excellent software for a good long time.
And not only understanding what the customer wants, but communicating that unambiguously to the AI. And note who is the "customer" here? Is it the end-users, or is it a client-company which contracts the project-manager for this task? But then the issue is still there, who in the client-company decides exactly what is needed and what the (potential) users want?
I think this situation emphasizes the importance of (something like) Agile. To produce something useful can only happen via experimentation and getting feedback from actual users, and re-iterating relentlessly.
Can a browser expert please go through the code the agent wrote (skim it), and let us know how it is. Is it comparable to ladybird, or Servo, can it ever reach that capability soon?
I'm interested in this too. I was expecting just a chromium reskin, but it does seem to be at least something more than that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625189 claims it uses Taffy for CSS layout but the docs also claim "Taffy for flex/grid, native for tables/block/inline"
I would love to know the cost of building this browser. I think that multi-agent orchestration systems will probably be the theme for systems this year.
I think the north-star metric for a multi-agent orchestrator system would be how much did it cost to get this done. how much better could we have done? should we have used a cheaper model for doing a trivial task and an expensive one to monitor it?
At the same time they were doing this, I also iterated on an AI-built web browser with around 2,000 lines of code. I was heavily in the loop for it, it didn't run autonomously. You can see the current version of the source code here:
I'm posting from that web browser. As an easter egg, mine has a cool Tetris clone (called Pentrix) based on pieces with 5 segments, the button for this is at the upper-right.
If you have any feature suggestions for what you want in a browser, please make them here:
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.
There's a clear conflict between SKILLS, tools and multi-tasking.
I think "intra-context" tooling is already dead. It's too narrow.
It's all "extra-context" now: how one instruments for multiple agents, at multiple times, handling things.
Personally, I think the best tool in this realm will come from open source, and be agnostic (many agents from many places interacting), in order to leverage differences between subtle provider qualities (speed, price and so on).
Building a browser is an interesting and expensive experiment. How much did it cost?
“Arthur looked up.
‘Ford,’ he said, ‘there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”
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 second attempt I've seen at this now! The other is this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1q4xfm0/over_chr...
My angle has been a bit different: scaling autonomous coding for individual developers, and in a much simpler way. I love CLI agents, but I found myself wasting time babysitting terminals while waiting for turns to finish. At some point it clicked: what if I could just email them?
Email sounds backward, but that’s the feature. It’s universal, async, already collaborative. The agent sends me a focused update, I reply with guidance, and it keeps working on a server somewhere, or my laptop, while I’m not glued to my desk. There’s still a human in the loop, just without micromanagement.
It’s been surprisingly joyful and productive, and it feels closer to how real organizations already work. I’ve put together a small, usable tool around this and shared it here if anyone wants to try it or kick the tires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629191
Lets make someone pass the one we have, this experiment didn't seem to yield a functioning browser, why would we raise the bar?
> There are tons of tiny edge cases and standards to comply with where implementing one standard will break 3 others if not done carefully. AI can't do that right now.
Firstly the CI is completely broken on every commit, all tests have failed and its and looking closely at the code, it is exactly what you expect for unmaintainable slop.
Having more lines of code is not a good measure of robust software, especially if it does not work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
I'm not sure the approach of "completely autonomous coding" is the right way to go. I feel like maybe we'll be able to use it more effectively if we think of them as something to be used by a human to accomplish some thing instead, lean into letting the human drive the thing instead, because quality spirals so quickly out of control.
Even their README is kind of crappy. Ideally you want installation instructions right near the top, but it's broken into multiple files. The README link that says "running + architecture" (but the file is actually called browser_ui.md???) is hard to follow. There is no explicit list of dependencies, and again no explanation of how JavaScript execution works, or how rendering works, really.
It's impressive that they got such a big project to be built by agents and to compile, but this codebase... Feels like AI slop, and you couldn't pay me to maintain it. You could try to get AI agents to maintain it, but my prediction is that past some scale, they would have a hard time figuring out their own mess. You would just be left with permanent bugs you can't easily fix.
I can’t shake the feeling that simply being a shameless about copy-paste (ie copyright infringement), would let existing tools do much the same faster and more efficiently. Download Chromium, search-replace ‘Google’ with ‘ME!’, run Make… if I put that in a small app someone would explain that’s actually solvable as a bash one-liner.
There’s a lot of utility in better search and natural language interactions. The siren call of feedback loops plays with our sense of time and might be clouding or sense of progress and utility.
But that's the thing, it doesn't compile, has a ton of errors, CI seems broken since long... What exactly is supposed to impressive here, that it managed to generate a bunch of code that doesn't even compile?
What in the holy hackers is this even about? Am I missing something obvious here? How is this news?
Yeah, answers need to be given.
It's about hyping up cursor and writing a blog post. You're not supposed to look at or use the code, obviously.
> Today's agents work well for focused tasks, but are slow for complex projects.
What does slow mean? Slower than humans? Need faster GPUs? What does it even imply? Too slow to produce the next token? Too slow in attempts to be usable? Need human intervention?
This piece is made and written to keep the bubble inflating further.
* A small statically generated Hugo website but with some clever linking/taxonomy stuff. This was a fairly self-contained project that is now 'finished' but wouldn't hvae taken me more than a few days to code up from scratch. * A scientific simulation package, to try and do a clean refresh of an existing one which i can point at for implementation details but which has some technical problems I would like to reduce/remove.
Claude code absolutely smashed the first one - no issues at all. With the second, no matter what I tried, it just made lots of mistakes, even when I just told it to copy the problematic parts and transpose them into the new structure. It basically got to a point where it wasn't correct and it didn't seem to be able to get out of a bit of a 'doom loop' and required manual intervention, no matter how much prompting and hints I gave it.
Did sign up for Claude Code myself this week, too, given the $10/month promo. I have experience with AI by using AWS Kiro at work and directly prompting Claude Opus for convos. After just 2 days and ~5-6 vibe coding sessions in total I got a working Life-OS-App created for my needs.
- Clone of Todoist with the features that I actually use/want. Projects, Tags, due dates, quick adding with a todoist like text-aware input (e.g. !p1, Today etc.)
- A fantastical like calendar. Again, 80% of the features I used from Fantastical
- A Habit Tracker
- A Goal Tracker (Quarterly / Yearly)
- A dashboard page showing todays summary with single click edit/complete marking
- User authentication and sharing of various features (e.g. tasks)
- Docker deployment which will eventually run on my NAS
I'm going to add a few more things and cancel quite a few subscriptions. It one-shots all tasks within minutes. It's wild. I can code but didn't bother looking at the code myself, because ... why.
Even though do not earn US Tech money, am tempted to buy the max subscription for a month or two although the price is still hard to swallow.
Claude and vibe coding is wild. If I can clone todoist within a few vibe coding sessions and then implement any additional/new feature I want within minutes instead proposing, praying and then waiting for months, why would I pay $$$...
The implied future here is _unreal cool_. Swarms of coding agents that can build anything, with little oversight. Long-running projects that converge on high-quality, complex projects.
But the examples feel thin. Web browsers, Excel, and Windows 7 exist, and they specifically exist in the LLM's training sets. The closest to real code is what they've done with Cursor's codebase .... but it's not merged yet.
I don't want to say, call me when it's merged. But I'm not worried about agents ability to produce millions of lines of code. I'm worried about their ability to intersect with the humans in the real world, both as users of that code and developers who want to build on top of it.
In my experience agents don't converge on anything. They diverge into low-quality monstrosities which at some point become entirely unusable.
There's just a bit over 3 browsers, 1 serious excel-like and small part of windows user side. That's really not enough for training for replicating those specific tasks.
This is how I think about it. I care about asymptotics. What initial conditions (model(s) x workflow/harness x input text artefacts) causes convergence to the best steady state? The number of lines of code doesn't have to grow, it could also shrink. It's about the best output.
because it is absolutely impossible to review that code and there is gazillion issues there.
The only way it can get merged is YOLO and then fix issues for months in prod which kinda defeats the purpose and brings gains close to zero.
But what would be the point of re-creating existing applications? It would be useful if you can produce a better version of those applications. But the point in this experiment was to produce something "from scratch" I think. Impressive yes, but is it useful?
A more practically useful task would be for Mozilla Foundation and others to ask AI to fix all bugs in their application(s). And perhaps they are trying to do that, let's wait and see.
I'd want to see some system, that 100%s the first task, saturation, does a great job on the next, then does a valiant effort on the third, then finally makes something promising but as yet unusable on the last.
This way we could see that scaling up difficulty results in a gradual decline in quality, and could have a decent measurement of where we are at and where we are going.
> Another experiment was doing an in-place migration of Solid to React in the Cursor codebase. It took over 3 weeks with +266K/-193K edits. As we've started to test the changes, we do believe it's possible to merge this change.
In my view, this post does not go into sufficient detail or nuance to warrant any serious discussion, and the sparseness of info mostly implies failure, especially in the browser case.
It _is_ impressive that the browser repo can do _anything at all_, but if there was anything more noteworthy than that, I feel they'd go into more detail than volume metrics like 30K commits, 1M LoC. For instance, the entire capability on display could be constrained to a handful of lines that delegate to other libs.
And, it "is possible" to merge any change that avoids regressions, but the majority of our craft asks the question "Is it possible to merge _the next_ change? And the next, and the 100th?"
If they merge the MR they're walking the walk.
If they present more analysis of the browser it's worth the talk (not that useful a test if they didn't scrutinize it beyond "it renders")
Until then, it's a mountain of inscrutable agent output that manages to compile, and that contains an execution pathway which can screenshot apple.com by some undiscovered mechanism.
But is this actually true? They don't say that as far as I can tell, and it also doesn't compile for me nor their own CI it seems.
If you can't reproduce or compile the experiment then it really doesn't work at all and nothing but a hype piece.
I guess probably at some point, something compiled, but cba to try to find that commit. I guess they should've left it in a better state before doing that blog post.
I do use AI heavily so I resorted to actually turning on warnings as errors in the rust codebases I work in.
It is also close to impossible run any node ecosystem without getting a wall of warnings.
You are an extreme outlier for putting in the work to fix all warnings
By far the most useful metric is to have a live system running for a year with widespread usage that produces a lower number of bugs than that of a codebase created by humans.
Until that happens, my skeptic hat will remain firmly on my head.
I think any large piece of software with well established standards and test suites will be able to be quickly rewritten and optimized by coding agents.
[1] https://github.com/sberan/tjs
[2] /spawn-perf-agents claude command: https://github.com/sberan/tjs/blob/main/.claude/commands/spa...
I started looking in the Cargo.toml to at least get an idea how the project was constructed. I saw there that rather than being built from scratch as the post seemed to imply that almost every core component was simply pulled in from an open source library. quickjs engine, wgpu graphics, winit windowing & input, egui for ui, html parsing, the list goes on. On twitter their CEO explicitly stated that it uses a "custom js vm" which seemed particularly misleading / untrue to me.
Integrating all of these existing components is still super impressive for these models to do autonomously, so I'm just at a loss how to feel when it does something impressive but they then feel the need to misrepresent so much. I guess I just have a lot less respect and trust for the cursor leadership, but maybe a little relief knowing that soon I may just generate my own custom cursor!
https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz
Maybe we ended up in the training data!
Great work by the way, blitz seems to be coming along nicely, and I even see you guys created a proto browser yourselves which is pretty cool, actually functional unlike Cursor's.
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.
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.
What is `FrameState::render_placeholder`?
``` pub fn render_placeholder(&self, frame_id: FrameId) -> Result<FrameBuffer, String> { let (width, height) = self.viewport_css; let len = (width as usize) .checked_mul(height as usize) .and_then(|px| px.checked_mul(4)) .ok_or_else(|| "viewport size overflow".to_string())?;
} ```What is it doing in these diffs?
https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/commit/f4a0974594e3...
I'd be really curious to see the amount of work/rework over time, and the token/time cost for each additional actual completed test case.
I'm very bullish on LLMs building software, but this doesn't mean the death of software products anymore than 3D printers meant the death of factories.
The hype may be similar, if that's your point then I agree, but the weakness of 3D printing is the range of materials and the conditions needed to work with them (titanium is merely extremely difficult, but no sane government will let the general public buy tetrafluoroethylene as a feedstock), while the weakness of machine learning (even more broadly than LLMs) is the number of examples they require in order to learn stuff.
It kinda blows my mind that this is possible, to build a browser engine that approximates a somewhat working website renderer.
Even if we take the most pessimistic interpretation of events ( heavy human steering, relies on existing libraries, sloppy code quality at places, not all versions compile etc)
The positive views are mostly from people who point out that what matters in the end is what the code does, not what it looks like, e.g. users don't see the code, nor do they care about the code, and that even for businesses who do care, LLMs may be the ones who have to pay down any technical debt that builds up.
* Anyone in a field where mistakes are expensive. In one project, I asked the LLM to code-review itself and it found security vulnerabilities in its own solutions. It's probably still got more I don't know about.
** In the original sense of just letting the LLM do whatever it wanted in response to the prompt, never reading or code reviewing the result myself until the end.
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.
If one vulnerability exists in those crates well, thats that.
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.
> Our mission is to automate coding
If AI could reach the point where we actually trusted the output, then we might stop checking it.
It's a very real issue, people just seem to assume their code is wrong rather than the compiler. I've personally reported 12 GCC bugs over the last 2 years and there's 1239 open wrong-code bugs currently.
Here's an example of a simple one in the C frontend that has existed since GCC 4.7: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=105180
AI coding agents are still a huge force-multiplier if you take this approach, though.
It would be walking the motorcycle.
All code interactions all happen through agents.
I suppose the question is if the agents only produce Swiss cheese solutions at scale and there's no way to fill in those gaps (at scale). Then yeah fully agentic coding is probably a pipe dream.
On the other hand if you can stand up a code generation machine where it's watts + Gpus + time => software products. Then well... It's only a matter of time until app stores entirely disappear or get really weird. It's hard to fathom the change that's coming to our profession in this world.
It turns out to matter a whole lot less than you would expect. Coding Agents are really good at using grep and writing out plans to files, which means they can operate successfully against way more code than fits in their context at a single time.
Interestingly, recently it seems to me like codex is actually compressing early and often so that it stays in the smarter-feeling reasoning zone of the first 1/3rd of the window, which is a neat solution for this, albeit with the caveat of post-compression behavior differences cropping up more often.
Presumably the security and validation of code still needs work, I haven't read anything that indicates those are solved yet, so people still need to read and understand the code, but we're at the "can do massive projects that work" stage.
Division of labor and planning and hierarchy are all rapidly advancing, the orchestration and coordination capabilities are going to explode in '26.
Who created those agents and gives them the tasks to work on. Who created the tests? AI, or the humans?
Of course it creates bottlenecks, since code quality takes time and people don’t get it right on the first try when the changes are complex. I could also be faster if I pushed directly to prod!
Don’t get me wrong. I use these tools, and I can see the productivity gains. But I also believe the only way to achieve the results they show is to sacrifice quality, because no software engineer can review the changes at the same speed the agent generates code. They may solve that problem, or maybe the industry will change so only output and LOC matter, but until then I will keep cursing the agent until I get the result I want.
Things like integration creating bottlenecks or a lack of consistent top down direction leading to small risk adverse changes instead of bold redesigns. All things I’ve seen before.
(Or are they?)
Sometimes workers will task other workers and act as a planner if the task is more complex.
It’s a good setup but it’s nothing like Claude Code.
The tokens were “expensive” from the minds of humans …
I think this situation emphasizes the importance of (something like) Agile. To produce something useful can only happen via experimentation and getting feedback from actual users, and re-iterating relentlessly.
I think the north-star metric for a multi-agent orchestrator system would be how much did it cost to get this done. how much better could we have done? should we have used a cheaper model for doing a trivial task and an expensive one to monitor it?
https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/172toy-browser.py.t... (turn the sound down, it's a bit loud if you interact with the built-in Tetris clone.)
You can run it after installing the packages, "pip install requests pillow urllib3 numpy simpleaudio"
I livestreamed the latest version here 2 weeks ago, it's a ten minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xdIMmrLMLo&t=45s
I'm posting from that web browser. As an easter egg, mine has a cool Tetris clone (called Pentrix) based on pieces with 5 segments, the button for this is at the upper-right.
If you have any feature suggestions for what you want in a browser, please make them here:
https://pollunit.com/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g
I think "intra-context" tooling is already dead. It's too narrow.
It's all "extra-context" now: how one instruments for multiple agents, at multiple times, handling things.
Personally, I think the best tool in this realm will come from open source, and be agnostic (many agents from many places interacting), in order to leverage differences between subtle provider qualities (speed, price and so on).
Building a browser is an interesting and expensive experiment. How much did it cost?