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With the way that AI is unfolding right now, this might be an outdated problem fairly soon. In 2026 if you can just tell your AI to build a new full-featured br

With the way that AI is unfolding right now, this might be an outdated problem fairly soon. In 2026 if you can just tell your AI to build a new full-featured browser before you go to sleep, you might have something in the morning.

berkes 2y ago
AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser". But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place. That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor stuff when the umpteenth web-api changes or lands. It cannot architecture the modules so that it can actually do this maintainance either. Generative AI is fantastic at generating stuff. It's terrible at maintaining, changing, tweaking. It's even worse at understanding what you mean with "It must have want a way to disable cookie popups" because that's both ambiguous, and actually the wrong instruction to begin with - for example. We must stop repeating "AI will be able to program our software for us very soon" because "programming software" is very little about churning out new code. As every programmer with a few years under their belt will know. What AI is good at, though, is enabling those programmers to be far more effective, efficient. To lower the barrier of entry. etc. But I'm 101% confident that no AI will "write a full-featured browser" that will continue to run for over half a month and/or one OS update.
- Philpax 2y ago
  I mean, the goal is to get it to a state where it can do those things. There are benchmarks for autonomously resolving issues that are being hill-climbed as we speak: https://www.swebench.com/ https://www.swebench.com/ I don't know how far away it is, but never say never.
- jfoster 2y ago
  What is the fundamental limitation that prevents AI from ever doing the maintenance tasks that you mentioned? Current AI cannot, of course, but the trajectory seems to be that it will be able to do such things better & faster than any human can.
  - bloppe 2y ago
    The trajectory actually seems to be plateauing already. OAI is struggling mightily to improve GPT enough to call it 5.0 and te struggles will only get harder as the number gets higher
    - jfoster 2y ago
      I think it will be nice if it does plateau, but one non-hit release from OpenAI is not a plateau on its own.
  - berkes 2y ago
    Two things: This requires a language that a human can give the specs in. A language that is both precise and unambiguous and understandable by humans. A... programming language? And it requires AI to understand the effects of changes it makes. On many levels. "If I move this module behind an abstraction, will it make it easier to maintain? Does it touch performance? Would it open security issues?" Generative AI isn't good at reasoning in that way. Maybe other AI, but it seems hardly anyone is pouring substantial funding into areas other than "a bigger and smarter generator than the competition" currently.
    - jfoster 2y ago
      As in, the web standards? Why couldn't it just read them online? Any other specs, couldn't it decide them on its own? From what I've seen, Grok 3 would be quite capable of inferring the effect of any change, at least at a high level. Have you used any of the recent models?
deleted 2y ago
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berkes 2y ago

AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser". But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place. That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor stuff when the umpteenth web-api changes or lands. It cannot architecture the modules so that it can actually do this maintainance either. Generative AI is fantastic at generating stuff. It's terrible at maintaining, changing, tweaking. It's even worse at understanding what you mean with "It must have want a way to disable cookie popups" because that's both ambiguous, and actually the wrong instruction to begin with - for example. We must stop repeating "AI will be able to program our software for us very soon" because "programming software" is very little about churning out new code. As every programmer with a few years under their belt will know. What AI is good at, though, is enabling those programmers to be far more effective, efficient. To lower the barrier of entry. etc. But I'm 101% confident that no AI will "write a full-featured browser" that will continue to run for over half a month and/or one OS update.

Philpax 2y ago
I mean, the goal is to get it to a state where it can do those things. There are benchmarks for autonomously resolving issues that are being hill-climbed as we speak: https://www.swebench.com/ https://www.swebench.com/ I don't know how far away it is, but never say never.
jfoster 2y ago
What is the fundamental limitation that prevents AI from ever doing the maintenance tasks that you mentioned? Current AI cannot, of course, but the trajectory seems to be that it will be able to do such things better & faster than any human can.
- bloppe 2y ago
  The trajectory actually seems to be plateauing already. OAI is struggling mightily to improve GPT enough to call it 5.0 and te struggles will only get harder as the number gets higher
  - jfoster 2y ago
    I think it will be nice if it does plateau, but one non-hit release from OpenAI is not a plateau on its own.
- berkes 2y ago
  Two things: This requires a language that a human can give the specs in. A language that is both precise and unambiguous and understandable by humans. A... programming language? And it requires AI to understand the effects of changes it makes. On many levels. "If I move this module behind an abstraction, will it make it easier to maintain? Does it touch performance? Would it open security issues?" Generative AI isn't good at reasoning in that way. Maybe other AI, but it seems hardly anyone is pouring substantial funding into areas other than "a bigger and smarter generator than the competition" currently.
  - jfoster 2y ago
    As in, the web standards? Why couldn't it just read them online? Any other specs, couldn't it decide them on its own? From what I've seen, Grok 3 would be quite capable of inferring the effect of any change, at least at a high level. Have you used any of the recent models?

deleted 2y ago

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