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·
    2 hours ago

    I think the only problem with the plagiarism is that the AI companies are profiting off acceess to it which would point to a different roor cause to the problem.

    I can’t tell what your opinion is, because when you say, “copyright infringement or plagiarism when non billionaires do it” are you just angry that the rules are unfair or that there is actually something inherently wrong with reusing code?

    • entwine@programming.dev
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I wasn’t really trying to give my opinion, but since you asked…

      I think copyright laws are a good thing for everyone. They’re definitely not perfect, but they do much more good than harm. The problem (which is not unique to copyright) is that the legal system treats large corporations differently than individuals and small businesses. The recent AI hype wave has supercharged this problem, but it’s not new.

      there is actually something inherently wrong with reusing code?

      Depends on what you mean. Open source software usually comes with a license attached, which is effectively a permission slip from its creator telling you what you can or can’t do with it. Without that pernission, you’d be violating their rights under copyright laws unless you limit yourself to what counts as “fair use”. That’s perfectly fine, and I don’t see why anyone reasonable would take issue with that.

      I know there are some fringe people out there who think copyright law shouldn’t exist at all, and that no individual deserves the right to exclusively profit off of their creative works. I don’t agree with that, and I don’t see how open source would work in that scenario as nobody would want to release anything. It’d make exploitation of the poor by the wealthy even more extreme, as those with the means to mass produce derivative products (eg you own a factory that can produce paintings or whatever) would be the only ones making a living off intellectual properties.

      But this is getting way off topic. I just wanted to call that guy stupid.

      • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        48 minutes 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·
          37 minutes 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.