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

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7466160

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…

…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.

  • Ludicrous0251@piefed.zipEnglish
    6·
    5 days ago

    Seriously, are you worried they’ll sue? They don’t want to open themselves up to discovery on this one, I guarantee it.

    • xxce2AAb@feddit.dkEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Heh, good point. The article does continue to make it clear that their claims don’t hold up though.