4 ms·

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

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.
    - polyglotfacto 9mo ago
      Yes, but that is not what I wrote. I wrote: "useless even as a proof of concept". It doesn't have to be perfect; it just needs to show a clear path forward.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - simonw 9mo ago
        I think rendering this is a pretty great proof of concept that illustrates a path forward to doing better: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwillison.jpg https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwil... If I was trying to build a new browser and I got to that point within a few weeks of starting I would be ecstatic.
        polyglotfacto 9mo ago
        So I think that's an easy way to achieve ecstasy for you then. I suggest giving it a try. A good place to look for how one could do this, is https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/tree/main https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/tree/main That project I consider a proper POC of a web engine, even though it doesn't even run javascript. Why? Because it has a nice architecture built around a clear idea--radical modularity--which could scale-up to a full web engine one day, despite major challenges remaining. I think that with AI assistance, if you had some idea, you could reshuffle components of Blitz and have your own thing rendering to the screen within a day. let's say you had a more ambitious goal, like taking Blitz and adding a JS engine like Boa. Well if you had some clear idea on how to do it, you could get a nice little POC in a week or two. Basically what I'm saying is that yes the AI would save you a ton of typing and you'd be able to iterate on your idea. There are plenty of layout/graphics/Js components out there to choose from, so you could ensure a relatively small and clean POC. Someone doing that, with or without AI but with a good idea, would impress me. FastRender on the other hand is just this humongous pile of spaghetti, and my guess is it still is entirely dependent on existing libraries for actually showing something to the screen. So that's the clear fail of the agent in my opinion: why produce so much code when it could be done so easily otherwise. Also, why bs yourself into these architecture docs and pretend you are following the specs when in fact you are not? Everytime I try to browse the code I give up, mostly because when I look at something to try to understand how it fits into the whole, I end-up realizing it's only used in some unit-test. For a quick comparison: - https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-paint/src/render.rs https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4eeb8bf3330678b7cb11c1490bdc/src/paint/painter.rs https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e... I believe the two are more or less doing the same, but one is 30x the size of the other. I can't begin to understand the render loop of Fastrender from the code. On the other hand, here is the one from Blitz shell(the default Blitz app putting together various modular components): - Window runs in winit loop: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-shell/src/window.rs#L345 https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - Redraw is at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-shell/src/window.rs#L258 https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - Calls into `paint_scene`, using the generic scene from the generic renderer: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-paint/src/lib.rs#L28 https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... Simple as that, and with a nice idea in terms of modularity. That's a POC web engine.

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.
  - polyglotfacto 9mo ago
    Yes, but that is not what I wrote. I wrote: "useless even as a proof of concept". It doesn't have to be perfect; it just needs to show a clear path forward.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - simonw 9mo ago
      I think rendering this is a pretty great proof of concept that illustrates a path forward to doing better: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwillison.jpg https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwil... If I was trying to build a new browser and I got to that point within a few weeks of starting I would be ecstatic.
      - polyglotfacto 9mo ago
        So I think that's an easy way to achieve ecstasy for you then. I suggest giving it a try. A good place to look for how one could do this, is https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/tree/main https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/tree/main That project I consider a proper POC of a web engine, even though it doesn't even run javascript. Why? Because it has a nice architecture built around a clear idea--radical modularity--which could scale-up to a full web engine one day, despite major challenges remaining. I think that with AI assistance, if you had some idea, you could reshuffle components of Blitz and have your own thing rendering to the screen within a day. let's say you had a more ambitious goal, like taking Blitz and adding a JS engine like Boa. Well if you had some clear idea on how to do it, you could get a nice little POC in a week or two. Basically what I'm saying is that yes the AI would save you a ton of typing and you'd be able to iterate on your idea. There are plenty of layout/graphics/Js components out there to choose from, so you could ensure a relatively small and clean POC. Someone doing that, with or without AI but with a good idea, would impress me. FastRender on the other hand is just this humongous pile of spaghetti, and my guess is it still is entirely dependent on existing libraries for actually showing something to the screen. So that's the clear fail of the agent in my opinion: why produce so much code when it could be done so easily otherwise. Also, why bs yourself into these architecture docs and pretend you are following the specs when in fact you are not? Everytime I try to browse the code I give up, mostly because when I look at something to try to understand how it fits into the whole, I end-up realizing it's only used in some unit-test. For a quick comparison: - https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-paint/src/render.rs https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4eeb8bf3330678b7cb11c1490bdc/src/paint/painter.rs https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e... I believe the two are more or less doing the same, but one is 30x the size of the other. I can't begin to understand the render loop of Fastrender from the code. On the other hand, here is the one from Blitz shell(the default Blitz app putting together various modular components): - Window runs in winit loop: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-shell/src/window.rs#L345 https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - Redraw is at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-shell/src/window.rs#L258 https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - Calls into `paint_scene`, using the generic scene from the generic renderer: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed30c1f97ac473632755a08a/packages/blitz-paint/src/lib.rs#L28 https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... Simple as that, and with a nice idea in terms of modularity. That's a POC web engine.