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Days after the fake story about Cursor building a web browser from scratch with GPT-5.2 was debunked. Disbelief should be the default reaction to stories like t
by rideontime 9mo ago
Days after the fake story about Cursor building a web browser from scratch with GPT-5.2 was debunked. Disbelief should be the default reaction to stories like this.
- ronsor 9mo agoThey did build a browser; it may not be a very compliant or complete browser, or even a useful one, but neither was IE6!
- nerdsniper 9mo agoI believe it was basically a broken, non-functioning wrapper around Servo internals. That’s what I’d expect from a high schooler who says “i wrote a web browser”, but not what I’d expect from a multi-billion dollar corporation.
- corvad 9mo agoThey aren't really a multi-billion dollar corporation. A lot of it is them just pumping up their valuation. Stuff like this proves that in a lot of ways.
- unfunco 9mo agoThey didn't build a browser from scratch.
- rideontime 9mo agoMy understanding is that it doesn't even compile if you clone the repo.
- s1mplicissimus 9mo agoIt didn't even compile, which makes me consider wether your comment is just ignorant or outright maliciously misleading
- simonw 9mo agoThe version that was live on GitHub the day they published their blog post was missing compilation instructions, didn't cleanly compile and didn't pass GitHub Actions CI. The project itself did compile most of the time it was being developed - the coding agents had been compiling it the whole time they were running on it. Shortly after the blog post they updated the GitHub repo with compilation instructions and it worked. I took this screenshot with it: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwillison.jpg https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwil... The "it didn't even compile" criticism is valid in pointing out that they messed up the initial release, but if you think "it never compiled" you have an incorrect mental model.
- orwin 9mo agoAlso, didn't it use Servo crates? I don't think you can say 'from scratch' if 60% of the actual work is from an external lib. If I install an Arch Linux, I don't say I 'installed Linux from scratch'.
- simonw 9mo agoIt used cssparser and html5ever from the Servo project, and it used the Taffy library for flexbox and CSS grid layout algorithms which isn't officially part of Servo but is used by Servo. I'd estimate that's a lot less than 60% of the "actual work" though.
- orwin 9mo agoMy bad, I was misinformed, thanks for correcting me, I thought it used the renderer, not just the parser. Thats honestly way better than what I thought.
- 9mo ago
- embedding-shape 9mo agoBtw, after I wrote that initial article ("Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence"), I gave it my own try to write a browser from scratch with just one agent, using no 3rd party crates, only commonly available system libraries, and just made a Show HN about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522 The end result: Me and one agent (codex) managed to build something more or less the same as Cursor's "hundreds of agents" running for weeks and producing millions of lines of code, in just 20K LOC (this includes X11, macOS and Windows support). Has --headless, --screenshot, handles scaling, link clicking and scrolling, and can render basic websites mostly fine (like HN) and most others not so fine. Also included CI builds and automatic releases because why not. The repository itself is here and should run out of the box on most modern OSes, downloads can be found at the Releases page: https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser
- simonw 9mo agoThis project is awesome - it really does render HTML+CSS effectively using 20,000 lines of dependency-free Rust (albeit using system libraries for image rendering and fonts). Here's a screenshot I took with it: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3mdg2oo6bms2o https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3mdg2oo6bms2...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9mo ago1 MB binary? That IS very impressive
- embedding-shape 9mo agoReleases are here: https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser/releases https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser/re... one-agent-one-browser-Linux-X64 1.14 MB one-agent-one-browser-macOS-ARM64 1.02 MB one-agent-one-browser-Windows-X64.exe 847 KB I wonder if I did a Wayland version it'd be bigger or smaller, right now only x11 (so via xWayland on Wayland).
- oefrha 9mo agoThe outrageous part of this is nowhere in the blog post or the repository indicates it's vibe coded garbage (hopefully I didn't miss it?). You expect some level of bullshit in AI company's latest AI vibe coding announcements. This can be mistaken for a classical blog post. Although the tell is obvious if you spent one second looking at https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers. That misaligned ASCII diagram, damn. Why is Cloudflare paying this guy again, just to vibe a bunch of garbage without even checking above the fold content in the README?
- embedding-shape 9mo ago> A production-grade Matrix homeserver implementation It's getting outright frustrating to deal with this. Fine, random hype-men gets hyped about stuff and tweets about it, doesn't mind me too much. Huge companies who used to have a lot of good will putting out stuff like this, seemingly with absolutely zero reviews before hitting publish? What are they doing? Have everyone decided to just give up and give in to the slop? We need "engineering" to make a comeback.
- Arathorn 9mo agohttps://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-policy https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/blob/main/CONT... is an example of engineering trying to make a comeback, on the Matrix side at least :)
- embedding-shape 9mo agoAs long as you take ownership, test your stuff and ensure it actually does what you claim it does, I don't mind if you use LLMs, a book or your dog. I'm mostly concerned that something we used to see as a part of basic "software engineering" (verify that what you build is actually doing what you think it is) has suddenly made a very quick exit from the scene, in chase of outputting more LOC which is completely backwards.
- 9mo ago
- bentcorner 9mo agoI get vibe coding a feature or news story or whatnot but how do you go about not even checking if the thing actually works, or fact checking the blog post?
- imcritic 9mo ago[flagged]
- rideontime 9mo agoWhy?
- imcritic 9mo ago[flagged]
- rideontime 9mo agoAre you sure that's "normal"?
- imcritic 9mo ago[flagged]
- dingnuts 9mo ago[flagged]
- imcritic 9mo ago[flagged]
- thunderfork 9mo agoComing to the comments to brag about ignoring something you clearly didn't ignore (given that you're here in the comments) is actually pretty abnormal behavior. Normal people don't jerk themselves off about being edgy in public. Hope this helps!
- blibble 9mo agoit seems as if literally everyone associated with "AI" is a grifter, shill (sorry, "Independent Researcher"), temporarily embarrassed billionaire, or just a flat out scammer I have yet to see a counter-example
- heliumtera 9mo agoEveryone (not really, but basically yes) associated with $current_thing is a rent seeking scammer. Even if Blockchain has tremendous impact, even if transformers are incredible (really) technology, even if NFTs could solve real world problems...you could basically say the same thing and be right, rounding up, 100% of the time, about anything technology related (and everything else as well). This truly is a clown world, but it is illegal to challenge it (or considered bad faith around here)
- PurpleRamen 9mo agoI would not rule out that sometimes they are just incompetent and believe their own story, because they just don't know it better. Seems this is called a "bad apple"?
- strange_quark 9mo agoI have a feeling that AI psychosis is more prevalent than we realize, especially in software.
- dingnuts 9mo ago[dead]
- knollimar 9mo agoI feel like there's a few people who just give too much benefit of the doubt because they're excited about the thing and hesitant to criticize.
- themafia 9mo agoIt's clear that on Hacker News many people have made absurdly deep investments into this "technology." There's going to be a long period of pearl clutching we have to dig out of until we get back to the standard hacker ethic of not believing anything published by corporations.
- subscribed 9mo agoIn all seriousness Cloudflare was usually pretty good in terms of blog posts.