Comment by wilsonzlin
19 hours ago
Hey, Wilson here, author of the blog post and the engineer working on this project. I've been reading the responses here and appreciate the feedback. I've posted some follow up context on Twitter/X[0], which I'll also write here:
The repo is a live incubator for the harness. We are actively researching the behavior of collaborative long running agents, and may in the future make the browser and other products this research produces more consumable by end users and developers, but it's not the goal for now. We made it public as we were excited by the early results and wanted to share; while far off from feature parity with the most popular production browsers today, we think it has made impressive progress in the last <1 week of wall time.
Given the interest in trying out the current state of the project, I've merged a more up-to-date snapshot of the system's progress that resolves issues with builds and CI. The experimental harness can occasionally leave the repo in an incomplete state but does converge, which was the case at the time of the post.
I'm here to answer any further questions you have.
[0] https://x.com/wilsonzlin/status/2012398625394221537?s=20
Hi, there. Two questions about this repo [0].
Can you show us what you did after people failed to compile that project [1]?
There are also questions about the attribution of these commits [2]. Can you share some information?
[0] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender [1] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 [2] https://gist.github.com/embedding-shapes/d09225180ea3236f180...
That doesn’t really address much of the criticism in this thread. No one is shocked that it’s not as good as production web browsers. It’s that it was billed as “from scratch” but upon deeper inspection it looks like it’s just gluing together Servo and some other dependencies, so it’s not really as impressive or interesting because the “agents” didn’t really create a browser engine.
Upon deeper inspection? Someone checked the Cargo file and proclaimed it was just Servo and QuickJS glued together without actually bothering to look if these dependencies are even being used.
In reality while project does indeed have Servo in its dependencies it only uses it for HTML tokenization, CSS selector matching and some low level structures. Javascript parsing and execution, DOM implementation & Layout engine was written from scratch with only one exception - Flexbox and Grid layouts are implemented using Taffy - a Rust layout library.
So while “from scratch” is debatable it is still immensely impressive to be that AI was able to produce something that even just “kinda works” at this scale.
> So while “from scratch” is debatable it is still immensely impressive to be that AI was able to produce something that even just “kinda works” at this scale.
“From scratch” is inarguably wrong given how much third-party code it depends on. There’s a reasonable debate about how much original content there is but if I was a principal at a company whose valuation hinges on the ability to actually deliver “from scratch” for real, I would be worried about an investor suing for material misrepresentation of the product if they bought now and the value went down in the future.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that for some parts that use dependencies, the agent could have implemented them itself. I've begun the process of removing many of these and developing them within the project alongside the browser. A reasonable goal for "from scratch" may be "if other major browsers use a dependency, it's fine to do so too". For example: OpenSSL, libpng, HarfBuzz, Skia.
I'd push back on the idea that all the agents did was glue dependencies together — the JS VM, DOM, CSS cascade, inline/block/table layouts, paint systems, text pipeline, chrome, and more are all being developed by agents as part of this project. There are real complex systems being engineered towards the goal of a browser engine, even if not fully there yet.
Make it port Firefox's engine to iOS, that's something people would actually use (in countries where Apple is forced to allow other browser engines).