I don't think the point was to say "look, AI can just take care of writing a browser now". I think it was to show just how far the tools have come. It's not meant to be production quality, it's meant to be an impressive demo of the state of AI coding. Showing how far it can be taken without completely falling over.

EDIT: I retract my claim. I didn't realize this had servo as a dependency.

I’m super impressed by how "zillions of lines of code" got re-branded as a reasonable metric by which to measure code, just because it sounds impressive to laypeople and incidentally happens to be the only thing LLMs are good at optimizing.

I love the quote from Gregory Terzian, one of the servo maintainers:

> "So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies, and neither is it copied from existing implementations: it's a uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling a real-world web engine."

It hurts, that it wasn't framed as an "Experiment" or "Look, we wanted to see how far AI can go - kinda failed the bar." Like it is, it pours water on the mills of all CEOs out there, that have no clue about coding, but wonder why their people are so expensive when: "AI can do it! D'oh!"

grifters gonna grift

AI will never be able to create a browser, just as AI was never able to defeat a chess grandmaster.

If I was to spend a trillion tokens on a barely working browser I would have started with the source code of Sciter [0] instead. I really like the premise of an electron alternative that compiles to a 5MB binary, with a custom data store based on DyBASE [1] built into the front end javascript so you can just persist any object you create. I was ready to build software on top of it but couldn't get the basic windows tutorial to work.

[0] https://sciter.com/

[1] http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html

You would think a CEO with a product that caters to developers would know that everyone was going to clone the repo and check his work. He just squandered a whole lot of credibility.

> According to Perplexity, my AI chatbot of choice, 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.

Don't publish things like that. At the very least link to a transcript, but this is a very non-credible way of reporting those numbers.

If you want to learn more about the Cursor project directly from the source I conducted a 47 minute interview with Wilson Lin, the developer behind FastRebder, last week.

We talked about dependencies, among a whole bunch of other things.

You can watch the full video on YouTube or read my extracted highlights here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/fastrender/

Just had my manager submit 3 PRs in a language he doesn’t understand (rust) and hasn’t ran or tested and is demanding quick reviews for hundreds of LoCs. These are tools but some people are clueless..

From an engineer working on this here on HN:

> ...while far off from feature parity with the most popular production browsers today...

What a way to phrase it!

You know, I found a bicycle in the trash. It doesn't work great yet, but I can walk it down a hill. While far off from the level of the most popular supercars today, I think we have made impressive progress going down the hill.

anyone remember finding the internet explorer control in windows forms, placing it down, adding some buttons, and telling people you made your own web browser? Maybe this exercise is eternal just in different forms

FTA:

> tools like Cursor can be genuinely helpful as glorified autocomplete and refactoring assistants

That suggests a fairly strong anti-AI bias by the author. Anyone who thinks that this is all AI coding tools are today is not actually using them seriously.

That's not to say that this exercise wasn't overhyped, but a more useful, less biased article that's not trying to push an agenda would look at what went right, as well as what went wrong.