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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 a

by simonw 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.
  - Fervicus 10mo ago
    How many non developers were going to look at that? They knew exactly what they were doing by saying that.
  - pera 10mo ago
    > I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation. I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226
    - vidarh 10mo ago
      I very much don't believe for a second anyone would manage to get a judgement against them on this in the UK. For starters, the language is highly subjective, and they'd be able to show vast amounts of discourse about software engineering where "from scratch" often does not involve starting with nothing, and they'd then go on to argue that the person suing haven't actually had any reason to believe that they would be able to replicate a setup that was described as a complex large-scale experiment without much more information. The person suing would have an uphill battle showing that whatever assumptions they made were something that was reasonable to infer based on that statement. And to have a case, a consumer would also then need to have relied on this as a significant factor in choosing to buy their services. But even if we assume the court would agree it is fraudulent, the remedy is only "directly consequential losses". In other words, I doubt anyone would lose sleep over this risk.
testdelacc1 10mo ago
The fact that the codebase is meaningless drivel has already been established, you don’t need to defend them. It’s just pure slop, and they’re trying to get people to believe that it’s a working browser. At the time he bragged about that `cargo build` didn’t even run! It was completely broken going back a hundred commits. So it was a complete lie to claim that it “kind of works”. You have a reputation. You don’t need to carry water for people who are misleading people to raise VC money. What’s the point of you language lawyering about the precise meaning of what he said? “No no, you don’t get it guys. I’m technically right if you look at the precise wording” is the kind of silly thing I do all the time. It’s not that important to be technically right. Let this one go.
- simonw 10mo ago
  Which part of their CEO saying "It kind of works" are you interpreting as "trying to get people to believe that it’s a working browser"? The reason I won't let this one go is that I genuinely believe people are being unfair to the engineer who built this, because some people will jump on ANY opportunity to "debunk" stories about AI. I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true.
  - blibble 10mo ago
    > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true. this level of outrage seems absent when it's misleading in the pro-"AI" direction
  - sensanaty 10mo ago
    > "It kind of works" https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 A project that didn't compile at all counts as "kind of" working now? > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true. True, at least if it was a wrapper then it would actually kind of work, unlike this which is the most obvious case of hyping lies up for investors I've witnessed in the last... Well, week or so, considering how much bullshit spews out of the mouths of AI bros.
dns_snek 10mo ago
> 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. It's far more dishonest to search for contrived interpretations of their statements in an attempt to frame them as "mostly accurate" when their statements are clearly misleading (and in my opinion, intentionally so). You're giving them infinite benefit of the doubt where they deserve none, as this industry is well known for intentionally misleading statements, you're brushing off serious factual misrepresentations as simple "lack of nuance" and finally trying to discredit people who have an issue with all of this. With all due respect, that's not the behavior of a neutral reporter but someone who's heavily invested in maintaining a certain narrative.
dminik 10mo ago
According to the twitter analytics you can see on the post (at least on nitter), the original > We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week. tweet was seen by over 6 million people. The follow up tweet which includes the link to the actual details was seen by less than 200000. That's just how Twitter engagement works and these companies know it. Over 6 million people were fed bullshit. I'm sorry, but it's actually a great example of CEOs over hyping their products.
- simonw 10mo ago
  That Tweet that was seen by 6 million people is here: https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552 https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552 You only quoted the first line. The full tweet includes the crucial "it kind of works" line - that's not in the follow-up tweet, it's in the original. Here's that first tweet in full: > 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. The second tweet, with only 225,000 views, was just the following text and a link to the GitHub repository: > Excited to continue stress testing the boundaries of coding agents and report back on what we learn. > Code here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender

by simonw 10mo ago

mikkupikku 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.
- Fervicus 10mo ago
  How many non developers were going to look at that? They knew exactly what they were doing by saying that.
- pera 10mo ago
  > I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation. I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226
  - vidarh 10mo ago
    I very much don't believe for a second anyone would manage to get a judgement against them on this in the UK. For starters, the language is highly subjective, and they'd be able to show vast amounts of discourse about software engineering where "from scratch" often does not involve starting with nothing, and they'd then go on to argue that the person suing haven't actually had any reason to believe that they would be able to replicate a setup that was described as a complex large-scale experiment without much more information. The person suing would have an uphill battle showing that whatever assumptions they made were something that was reasonable to infer based on that statement. And to have a case, a consumer would also then need to have relied on this as a significant factor in choosing to buy their services. But even if we assume the court would agree it is fraudulent, the remedy is only "directly consequential losses". In other words, I doubt anyone would lose sleep over this risk.

testdelacc1 10mo ago

The fact that the codebase is meaningless drivel has already been established, you don’t need to defend them. It’s just pure slop, and they’re trying to get people to believe that it’s a working browser. At the time he bragged about that `cargo build` didn’t even run! It was completely broken going back a hundred commits. So it was a complete lie to claim that it “kind of works”. You have a reputation. You don’t need to carry water for people who are misleading people to raise VC money. What’s the point of you language lawyering about the precise meaning of what he said? “No no, you don’t get it guys. I’m technically right if you look at the precise wording” is the kind of silly thing I do all the time. It’s not that important to be technically right. Let this one go.

simonw 10mo ago
Which part of their CEO saying "It kind of works" are you interpreting as "trying to get people to believe that it’s a working browser"? The reason I won't let this one go is that I genuinely believe people are being unfair to the engineer who built this, because some people will jump on ANY opportunity to "debunk" stories about AI. I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true.
- blibble 10mo ago
  > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true. this level of outrage seems absent when it's misleading in the pro-"AI" direction
- sensanaty 10mo ago
  > "It kind of works" https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 A project that didn't compile at all counts as "kind of" working now? > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true. True, at least if it was a wrapper then it would actually kind of work, unlike this which is the most obvious case of hyping lies up for investors I've witnessed in the last... Well, week or so, considering how much bullshit spews out of the mouths of AI bros.

dns_snek 10mo ago

> 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. It's far more dishonest to search for contrived interpretations of their statements in an attempt to frame them as "mostly accurate" when their statements are clearly misleading (and in my opinion, intentionally so). You're giving them infinite benefit of the doubt where they deserve none, as this industry is well known for intentionally misleading statements, you're brushing off serious factual misrepresentations as simple "lack of nuance" and finally trying to discredit people who have an issue with all of this. With all due respect, that's not the behavior of a neutral reporter but someone who's heavily invested in maintaining a certain narrative.

dminik 10mo ago

According to the twitter analytics you can see on the post (at least on nitter), the original > We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week. tweet was seen by over 6 million people. The follow up tweet which includes the link to the actual details was seen by less than 200000. That's just how Twitter engagement works and these companies know it. Over 6 million people were fed bullshit. I'm sorry, but it's actually a great example of CEOs over hyping their products.

simonw 10mo ago
That Tweet that was seen by 6 million people is here: https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552 https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552 You only quoted the first line. The full tweet includes the crucial "it kind of works" line - that's not in the follow-up tweet, it's in the original. Here's that first tweet in full: > 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. The second tweet, with only 225,000 views, was just the following text and a link to the GitHub repository: > Excited to continue stress testing the boundaries of coding agents and report back on what we learn. > Code here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender