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Comment by simonw

8 hours ago

I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.

But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth.

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simonw

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tyre  6 hours ago

Sorry, just to be clear, the defense that they pulled something out of their ass is that they linked to something that outed them? So they couldn't have actually have been overstating it?

If anything, that proves the point that they weren't rigorous! They claimed a thing. The thing didn't accomplish what they said. I'm not saying that they hid it but that they misrepresented the thing that they built. My comment to you is that the interview didn't directly firmly pressure them on this.

Generating a million lines of code in parallel isn't impressive. Burning a mountain of resources in parallel isn't noteworthy (see: the weekly post of someone with an out of control EC2 instance racking up $100k of charges.)

It would have been remarkable if they'd built a browser from scratch, which they said they did, except they didn't. It was a 50 million token hackathon project that didn't work, dressed up as a groundbreaking example of their product.

As feedback, I hope in the future you'll push back firmly on these types of claims when given the opportunity, even if it makes the interviewee uncomfy. Incredible claims require incredible evidence. They didn't have it.

  • simonw  6 hours ago

    My goal in the interview was to get to as accurate a version of what they actually built and how they built it as possible.

    I don't think directly accusing them of being misleading about what they had done would have supported that goal, so I didn't do it.

    Instead I made sure to dig into things like what QuickJS was doing in there and why it used Taffy as part of the conversation.

    • cube00  2 hours ago

      3 days ago: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743831)

      > Honestly, grilling him about what the CEO had tweeted didn't even cross my mind.

      Today:

      > I don't think directly accusing them of being misleading about what they had done would have supported that goal, so I didn't do it.

      I find it hard to follow how it didn't cross your mind while for the same interview you had also considered the situation and determined it didn't meet the interview goal.

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Fervicus  7 hours ago

How many non developers were going to look at that? They knew exactly what they were doing by saying that.

mjr00  7 hours ago

> But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth.

Well, yes and no; we live in an era where people consume headlines, not articles, and certainly not links to Github repositories in articles. If VCs and other CEOs read the headline "Cursor Agents Autonomously Create Web Browser From Scratch" on LinkedIn, the project has served its purpose and it really doesn't matter if the code compiles or not.