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It is the same project, but my impression is that HN exaggerated many of the issues with it. For example: - They did eventually get it to build. Unknown to m

by comex 9mo ago

It is the same project, but my impression is that HN exaggerated many of the issues with it. For example: - They did eventually get it to build. Unknown to me: were the agents working on it able to build it, or were they blindly writing code? The codebase can't have been _that_ broken since it didn't take long for them to get it buildable, and they'd produced demo screenshots before that. - It had a dependency on QuickJS, but also a homegrown JS implementation; apparently (according to this post) QuickJS was intended as a placeholder. I have no idea which, if either, ended up getting used, though I suspect it may not even matter for the static screenshots they were showing off (the sites may not have required JS to show that). - Some of the dependencies (like Skia and HarfBuzz) are libraries that other browsers also depend on and are not part of browser projects themselves. - Other dependencies probably shouldn't have been used, but they only represent a fraction of what a browser has to do. However… What I don't know, and seemingly nobody else knows, is how functional the rest of the codebase is. It's apparently very slow and fails to render most websites. But is this more like "lots of bugs, but a solid basis", or is it more like "cargo-culted slop; even the stuff that works only works by chance"? I hope someone investigates.

simonw 9mo ago
> were the agents working on it able to build it, or were they blindly writing code? The project was able to build the whole time, and the agents were constantly compiling it using the Rust compiler and fixing any compile errors as they occurred. The GitHub CI builds were failing, and when they first opened the repo people incorrectly assumed that meant the code didn't compile at all. The biggest problem with the repo when they first released it was that there were no build instructions for end-users, so it was hard to try out. They fixed that within 24 hours of the initial release. > What I don't know, and seemingly nobody else knows, is how functional the rest of the codebase is. It's functional enough to render web pages - you can build it and run it yourself to see that, I have some screenshots from trying it out here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/scaling-long-running-autonomous-coding/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/scaling-long-running-a... That said, it's very much intended as a research project into running parallel coding agents as opposed to a serious browser project that's intended for end users. At the end of my post I compare it to "hello world" - I think "build a browser" may be the "hello world" of massively parallel coding agent systems, which I find quite amusing.
- felipeerias 9mo ago
  If you were looking for a good long-term AI benchmark, “build me a Web browser” should last you for a while.
- beepbooptheory 9mo ago
  I hear you but still just struggle what we are supposed to take from this. If I worked for McDonalds and came up with a way to make 1000 bad hamburgers in the time it takes for them to currently make 10 good ones, no one would be that impressed. "Hello world" is self-justifying, you know it when you see it, and it is what it is because it shows something unambiguous and impossible to mistake.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - simonw 9mo ago
    The thing I took from this is that you can arrange a set of coding agents in a tree of planners and workers and have them churn away on much larger projects than if you use a single coding agent. This is a new capability - this likely would now have worked prior to GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5, so we've had models that can do this for less than three months. It's extremely new: the patterns that work are just starting to be figured out. Wilson had an effectively unlimited token budget from Cursor and got to run experiments that most teams would not be able to afford.
    - polyglotfacto 9mo ago
      The fact that it is new is meaningless: the output is useless even as a proof of concept web engine and should be discarded, alongside the agent engineering pattern that produced it.
      - simonw 9mo ago
        By that logic any experiment that doesn't produce a perfect result should be deleted. I don't think that's a defensible position.

by comex 9mo ago

simonw 9mo ago

> were the agents working on it able to build it, or were they blindly writing code? The project was able to build the whole time, and the agents were constantly compiling it using the Rust compiler and fixing any compile errors as they occurred. The GitHub CI builds were failing, and when they first opened the repo people incorrectly assumed that meant the code didn't compile at all. The biggest problem with the repo when they first released it was that there were no build instructions for end-users, so it was hard to try out. They fixed that within 24 hours of the initial release. > What I don't know, and seemingly nobody else knows, is how functional the rest of the codebase is. It's functional enough to render web pages - you can build it and run it yourself to see that, I have some screenshots from trying it out here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/scaling-long-running-autonomous-coding/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/scaling-long-running-a... That said, it's very much intended as a research project into running parallel coding agents as opposed to a serious browser project that's intended for end users. At the end of my post I compare it to "hello world" - I think "build a browser" may be the "hello world" of massively parallel coding agent systems, which I find quite amusing.

felipeerias 9mo ago
If you were looking for a good long-term AI benchmark, “build me a Web browser” should last you for a while.
beepbooptheory 9mo ago
I hear you but still just struggle what we are supposed to take from this. If I worked for McDonalds and came up with a way to make 1000 bad hamburgers in the time it takes for them to currently make 10 good ones, no one would be that impressed. "Hello world" is self-justifying, you know it when you see it, and it is what it is because it shows something unambiguous and impossible to mistake.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- simonw 9mo ago
  The thing I took from this is that you can arrange a set of coding agents in a tree of planners and workers and have them churn away on much larger projects than if you use a single coding agent. This is a new capability - this likely would now have worked prior to GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5, so we've had models that can do this for less than three months. It's extremely new: the patterns that work are just starting to be figured out. Wilson had an effectively unlimited token budget from Cursor and got to run experiments that most teams would not be able to afford.
  - polyglotfacto 9mo ago
    The fact that it is new is meaningless: the output is useless even as a proof of concept web engine and should be discarded, alongside the agent engineering pattern that produced it.
    - simonw 9mo ago
      By that logic any experiment that doesn't produce a perfect result should be deleted. I don't think that's a defensible position.