Opinion: Autonomous agents may generate millions of lines of code, but shipping software is another matter

AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won’t say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: “We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor.”

He followed up with: “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.”

That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? He also added: “It kind of works,” which is not the most ringing endorsement…

Too bad it wasn’t true. If you actually looked at Cursor engineer Wilson Lin’s blog post about FastRender, the AI-created web browser, you won’t see much boasting about a working web browser. Instead, there’s a video of a web browser sort of working, and a much less positive note that “building a browser from scratch is extremely difficult.”

Developers quickly discovered the “browser” barely compiles, often does not run, and was heavily misrepresented in marketing.

…this week‑long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20 trillion tokens and would have cost several million dollars at then‑current list prices for frontier models.

  • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    5 hours ago

    How exactly is the copyright system good? It’s literally just a tool for large companies to stifle competition.

    There are a lot of FOSS projects that are done because people simply want to do them, your assumption that only the profit motive gets people to do literally anything is very telling. The profit motive is exactly why our society is as horrible as it is, healthcare, government corruption, the entertainment industry in general, just look around and tell me things are going well when we go into literally everything hoping to be able to profit off other people.

    Copyright and most “intellectual property” laws are simply stifling the human race in the name of disproportionately enriching the few who have absolutely enjoyed the free labor of others to get to the place they are now.

    I’m not saying people shouldn’t be rewarded for doing good work, but that’s not what this system actually accomplishes. It’s just the illusion of a system of meritocracy.

    • entwine@programming.dev
      1·
      5 hours ago

      It’s literally just a tool for large companies to stifle competition.

      This is obviously wrong, but reveals the direction a conversation with you would take. No thanks.

      Have a nice day.