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Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by parallel agents

70 points by lumpa

by terabytest

5 subcomments

> FastRender may not be a production-ready browser, but it represents over a million lines of Rust code, written in a few weeks, that can already render real web pages to a usable degree
I feel that we continue to miss the forest for the trees. Writing (or generating) a million lines of code in Rust should not count as an achievement in and of itself. What matters is whether those lines build, function as expected (especially in edge cases) and perform decently. As far as I can tell, AI has not been demonstrated to be useful yet at those three things.

by embedding-shape

3 subcomments

simonw, I find it almost shocking how you had the chance to talk directly with the engineer who built this, and even when he directly says things that contradict what Cursor's own CEO said, you didn't push back a single iota.
Is the takeaway here that it's fine for a CEO to claim "it even has a custom JS VM!" on Twitter/X, then afterwards the engineer explains: "The JavaScript engine isn’t working yet" and "the agents decided to pause it", and this is all OK? Not a single pushback about this very obvious contradiction? This is just one example of many, and again, since it seems to be repeated: no, no one thinks this was supposed to rival Chrome, what a trite way of trying to change the narrative.
I understand you don't want to spook future potential interviewees, but damn if that didn't feel like you suddenly are trying to defend Cursor here, instead of being curious about what actually happened. It doesn't feel curious, it feels like we're all giving up the fight against unneeded hype, exaggeration and degradation of quality.
What happened with balanced perspectives, where we don't just take people for their words, and when we notice something is off, we bring it up?
On a separate note, I actually emailed Wilson Lin too, asking if I could ask questions about it. While he initially accepted, I never actually received any answers. I'm glad to you were able to get someone from Cursor to clarify a bit at least, even though we're still just scratching the surface. I just wish we had a bit more integrity in the ecosystem and community I guess.

by WD-42

2 subcomments

Is this the project announced a week or two ago by an AI company claiming they had built a browser but it turned out to be a crappy wrapper around Servo that didn’t even build? Or is this another one? I thought it was Anthropic but this says Cursor.

by nurettin

1 subcomments

I welcome living in this absurd time where monkeys with typewriters producing a work of Shakespeare has become a reality.

by joduplessis

0 subcomment

I wonder if we're heading to a situation where agent written code will function as something distinct, like bytecode.

by lifis

1 subcomments

Why not help the Servo project instead of just making a proof of concept?

by Ronsenshi

3 subcomments

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
I'm curious what is the energy/environmental/financial impact of this "research" effort of cobbling together a browser based on AI model that had been trained on freely available source code of existing browsers.
I can't imagine this browser being used outside of tinkering or curiosity toy - so the purpose of the research is just to see whether you can run absurd amount of agents simultaneously and produce something that somewhat works?

by yeasku

0 subcomment

[dead]

by benatkin

2 subcomments

I'm going to propose a law for these AI orchestration systems based on Greenspun's Tenth Law:
> Any sufficiently complicated AI orchestration system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Gas Town.