Comment by ryanisnan
1 day ago
The amount of negativity in the original post was astounding.
People were making all sorts of statements like: - “I cloned it and there were loads of compiler warnings” - “the commit build success rate was a joke” - “it used 3rd party libs” - “it is AI slop”
What they all seem to be just glossing over is how the project unfolded: without human intervention, using computers, in an exceptionally accelerated time frame, working 24hr/day.
If you are hung up on commit build quality, or code quality, you are completely missing the point, and I fear for your job prospects. These things will get better; they will get safer as the workflows get tuned; they will scale well beyond any of us.
Don’t look at where the tech is. Look where it’s going.
As mentioned elsewhere (I'm the author of this blogpost), I'm a heavy LLM user myself, use it everyday as a tool, get lots of benefits from it. It's not a "hit post" on using LLM tools for development, it's a post about Cursor making grand claims without being able to back them up.
No one is hung up on the quality, but there is a ground fact if something "compiles" or "doesnt". No one is gonna claim a software project was successful if the end artifact doesn't compile.
I think for the point of the article, it appeared to, at some point, render homepages for select well known sites. I certainly did not expect this to be a serious browser, with any reliability or legs. I don’t think that is dishonest.
> I certainly did not expect this to be a serious browser, with any reliability or legs.
Me neither, and I note so twice in the submission article. But I also didn't expect a project that for the last 100+ commits couldn't reliably be built and therefore tested and tried out.
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> What they all seem to be just glossing over is how the project unfolded: without human intervention, using computers, in an exceptionally accelerated time frame, working 24hr/day.
Correct, but Gas Town [1] already happened and what's more _actually worked_, so this experiment is both useless (because it doesn't demonstrate working software) _and_ derivative (because we've already seen that you can set up a project where with spend similar to the spend of a single developer you can churn out more code than any human could read in a week).
[1]: https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown
> What they all seem to be just glossing over is how the project unfolded: without human intervention, using computers, in an exceptionally accelerated time frame, working 24hr/day.
The reason I have yet to publish a book is not because I can't write words. I got to 120k words or so, but they never felt like the right words.
Nobody's giving me (nor should they give me) a participation trophy for writing 120k words that don't form a satisfying novel.
Same's true here. We all know that LLMs can write a huge quantity of code. Thing is, so does:
The hard part, the entire reason to either be afraid for our careers or thrilled we can switch to something more productive than being code monkeys for yet-another-CRUD-app (depending on how we feel), that's the specific test that this experiment failed at.
Spending 24h/day to build nothing isn't impressive - it's really, really bad. That's worse than spending 8h/day to build nothing.
If the piece of shit can't even compile, it's equivalent to 0 lines of code.
> Don’t look at where the tech is. Look where it’s going.
Given that the people making the tech seem incapable of not lying, that doesn't give me hope for where it's going!
Look, I think AI and LLMs in particular are important. But the people actively developing them do not give me any confidence. And, neither do comments like these. If I wanted to believe that all of this is in vain, I would just talk to people like you.
>If you are hung up on commit build quality
I'm sorry but what? Are you really trying to argue that it doesn't matter that nothing works, that all it produced is garbage and that what is really important is that it made that garbage really quickly without human oversight?
That's.....that's not success.
Quality absolutely matters, but it's hyper context dependent.
Not everything needs to, or should have the same quality standards applied to them. For the purposes of the Cursor post, it doesn't bother me that most of the commits produced failed builds. I assume, from their post, that at some points, it was capable of building, and rendering the pages shown in the video on the post. That alone, is the thing that I think is interesting.
Would I use this browser? Absolutely not. Do I trust the code? Not a chance in hell. Is that the point? No.
"Quality" here isn't if A is better than B. It's "Does this thing actually work at all?"
Sure, I don't care too much if the restaurant serves me food with silverware that is 18/10 vs 18/0 stainless steel, but I absolutely do care if I order a pizza and they just dump a load of gravel onto my plate and tell me it's good enough, and after all, quality isn't the point.
Software that won’t compile and doesn’t do anything is not software, it’s just a collection of text files. A computer that won’t boot isn’t a computer anymore, it’s a paperweight. A car that won’t start isn’t a car anymore, it’s scrap metal.
I can bang on a keyboard for a week and produce tons of text files - but if they don’t do anything useful, would you consider me a programmer?
> Quality absolutely matters, but it's hyper context dependent.
There are very few software development contexts where the quality metric of “does the project build and run at all” doesn’t matter quite a lot.
It is hard to look at where it is going when there are so many lies about where the tech is today. There are extraordinary claims made on Twitter all the time about the technology, but when you look into things, it’s all just smoke and mirrors, the claims misrepresent the reality.
What a silly take. Where the tech is is extremely relevant. The reality of this blog post is it shows the tech is clearly not going anywhere better either, as they seem to imply. 24 hours of useless code is still useless code.
This idea that quality doesn't matter is silly. Quality is critical for things to work, scale, and be extensible. By either LLMs or humans.
People that spend time poking holes in random vendor claims remind me of folks you see video of standing on the beach during a tsunami warning. Their eyes fixed on the horizon looking for a hundred foot wave, oblivious to the shore in front of them rapidly being gobbled up by the sea.
> oblivious to the shore in front of them rapidly being gobbled up by the sea
Am I misunderstanding this metaphor? Tsunamis pull the sea back before making landfall.