6 ms·

I love the quote from Gregory Terzian, one of the servo maintainers: > "So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies, and neither is it copied from exi

I love the quote from Gregory Terzian, one of the servo maintainers: > "So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies, and neither is it copied from existing implementations: it's a uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling a real-world web engine." It hurts, that it wasn't framed as an "Experiment" or "Look, we wanted to see how far AI can go - kinda failed the bar." Like it is, it pours water on the mills of all CEOs out there, that have no clue about coding, but wonder why their people are so expensive when: "AI can do it! D'oh!"

simonw 8mo ago
That was from a conversation here on Hacker News the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541#46709191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541#46709191
- tyre 8mo ago
  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 on toes while they get their marketing in.
  - blibble 8mo ago
    pushing would definitely stop the supply of interviews/freebies/speaking engagements
  - simonw 8mo ago
    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 meaningful progress. Hundreds of workers run concurrently, pushing to the same branch with minimal conflicts. That's all true. On Twitter their CEO said: > We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week. > It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM. > It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly. That's mostly accurate too, especially the "it kind of works" bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch" claim if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't particularly surprising. In the overall genre of CEO's over-hyping their company's achievements this is a pretty weak example. 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.
    - mikkupikku 8mo ago
      > That's mostly accurate too, especially the "it kind of works" bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch" claim if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't particularly surprising. > In the overall genre of CEO's over-hyping their company's achievements this is a pretty weak example I kind of agree, but kind of not. The tweet isn't too bad when read from an experienced engineer perspective, but if we're being real then the target audience was probably meant to be technically clueless investors who don't and can't understand the nuance.
    - mjr00 8mo ago
      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'm not saying an LLM using existing libraries is a bad thing--in fact I'd consider an LLM which didn't pull in a bunch of existing libraries for the prompt "build a web browser" to be behaving incorrectly--but the CEO is misrepresenting what happened here.
      - simonw 8mo ago
        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.
        mjr00 8mo ago
        > But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth. Well, yes and no; we live in an era where people consume headlines, not articles, and certainly not links to Github repositories in articles. If VCs and other CEOs read the headline "Cursor Agents Autonomously Create Web Browser From Scratch" on LinkedIn, the project has served its purpose and it really doesn't matter if the code compiles or not.
  - moomoo11 8mo ago
    Why would he push back? His whole schtick is to sell only AI hype. He’s not going to hurt his revenue.
    - square_usual 8mo ago
      That's a great way to tell on yourself that you've never read Simon's work.
      - blibble 8mo ago
        the bare minimum of criticism to allow independence to be claimed?
      - GoatInGrey 8mo ago
        On the contrary, we get to read hundreds of his comments explaining how the LLM in anecdote X didn't fail, it was the developer's fault and they should know better than to blame the LLM. I only know this because on occasion I'll notice there was a comment from them (I only check the name of the user if it's a hot take) and I ctrl-F their username to see 20-70 matches on the same thread. Exactly 0 of those comments present the idea that LLMs are seriously flawed in programming environments regardless of who's in the driver seat. It always goes back to operator error and "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years...". I dunno, I manage LLM implementation consulting teams and I will tell you to your face that LLMs are unequivocally shit for the majority of use cases. It's not hard to directly criticize the tech without hiding behind deflections or euphemisms.
        simonw 8mo ago
        > Exactly 0 of those comments present the idea that LLMs are seriously flawed in programming environments regardless of who's in the driver seat. Why would I say that when I very genuinely believe the opposite? LLMs are flawed in programming environments if driven by people who don't know how to use them effectively. Learning to use them effectively is unintuitive and difficult, as I'm sure you've seen yourself. So I try to help people learn how to use them, through articles like https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ and comments like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765460#46765940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765460#46765940 (I don't ever say variants of "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years..." though, I think predicting future improvements is pointless when we can be focusing on what the models we have right now can do.)
  - well_ackshually 8mo ago
    The person you're responding to isn't a journalist, they're a mouthpiece. Pushing means they don't get these interviews anymore. The quality of whatever they put out as a result of it is yours to take into consideration.
MattGrommes 8mo ago
In blacksmithing there's the concept of an "anvil shaped object". That is, something that looks like an anvil but is hollow or made of ceramic or something. It might stand up to tapping on for making jewelry or something but should never be worked like a real anvil for fear of hurting someone or wrecking the thing you're working on when it breaks. I feel like a lot of the AI articles and experiments like this one are producing "app shaped objects" that look okay for making content (and indeed are fine for making earrings) but fall apart when pounded on by the real world.
- tempodox 8mo ago
  Plus we can suspect a tremendous amount of astroturfing on this topic. When you’re spending billions on the tech, a few millions (if it even is that much) for “creative marketing” are really nothing.

simonw 8mo ago

That was from a conversation here on Hacker News the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541#46709191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541#46709191

tyre 8mo ago
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 on toes while they get their marketing in.
- blibble 8mo ago
  pushing would definitely stop the supply of interviews/freebies/speaking engagements
- simonw 8mo ago
  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 meaningful progress. Hundreds of workers run concurrently, pushing to the same branch with minimal conflicts. That's all true. On Twitter their CEO said: > We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week. > It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM. > It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly. That's mostly accurate too, especially the "it kind of works" bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch" claim if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't particularly surprising. In the overall genre of CEO's over-hyping their company's achievements this is a pretty weak example. 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.
  - mikkupikku 8mo ago
    > That's mostly accurate too, especially the "it kind of works" bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch" claim if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't particularly surprising. > In the overall genre of CEO's over-hyping their company's achievements this is a pretty weak example I kind of agree, but kind of not. The tweet isn't too bad when read from an experienced engineer perspective, but if we're being real then the target audience was probably meant to be technically clueless investors who don't and can't understand the nuance.
  - mjr00 8mo ago
    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'm not saying an LLM using existing libraries is a bad thing--in fact I'd consider an LLM which didn't pull in a bunch of existing libraries for the prompt "build a web browser" to be behaving incorrectly--but the CEO is misrepresenting what happened here.
    - simonw 8mo ago
      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.
      - mjr00 8mo ago
        > But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth. Well, yes and no; we live in an era where people consume headlines, not articles, and certainly not links to Github repositories in articles. If VCs and other CEOs read the headline "Cursor Agents Autonomously Create Web Browser From Scratch" on LinkedIn, the project has served its purpose and it really doesn't matter if the code compiles or not.
- moomoo11 8mo ago
  Why would he push back? His whole schtick is to sell only AI hype. He’s not going to hurt his revenue.
  - square_usual 8mo ago
    That's a great way to tell on yourself that you've never read Simon's work.
    - blibble 8mo ago
      the bare minimum of criticism to allow independence to be claimed?
    - GoatInGrey 8mo ago
      On the contrary, we get to read hundreds of his comments explaining how the LLM in anecdote X didn't fail, it was the developer's fault and they should know better than to blame the LLM. I only know this because on occasion I'll notice there was a comment from them (I only check the name of the user if it's a hot take) and I ctrl-F their username to see 20-70 matches on the same thread. Exactly 0 of those comments present the idea that LLMs are seriously flawed in programming environments regardless of who's in the driver seat. It always goes back to operator error and "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years...". I dunno, I manage LLM implementation consulting teams and I will tell you to your face that LLMs are unequivocally shit for the majority of use cases. It's not hard to directly criticize the tech without hiding behind deflections or euphemisms.
      - simonw 8mo ago
        > Exactly 0 of those comments present the idea that LLMs are seriously flawed in programming environments regardless of who's in the driver seat. Why would I say that when I very genuinely believe the opposite? LLMs are flawed in programming environments if driven by people who don't know how to use them effectively. Learning to use them effectively is unintuitive and difficult, as I'm sure you've seen yourself. So I try to help people learn how to use them, through articles like https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ and comments like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765460#46765940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765460#46765940 (I don't ever say variants of "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years..." though, I think predicting future improvements is pointless when we can be focusing on what the models we have right now can do.)
- well_ackshually 8mo ago
  The person you're responding to isn't a journalist, they're a mouthpiece. Pushing means they don't get these interviews anymore. The quality of whatever they put out as a result of it is yours to take into consideration.

MattGrommes 8mo ago

In blacksmithing there's the concept of an "anvil shaped object". That is, something that looks like an anvil but is hollow or made of ceramic or something. It might stand up to tapping on for making jewelry or something but should never be worked like a real anvil for fear of hurting someone or wrecking the thing you're working on when it breaks. I feel like a lot of the AI articles and experiments like this one are producing "app shaped objects" that look okay for making content (and indeed are fine for making earrings) but fall apart when pounded on by the real world.

tempodox 8mo ago
Plus we can suspect a tremendous amount of astroturfing on this topic. When you’re spending billions on the tech, a few millions (if it even is that much) for “creative marketing” are really nothing.