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Comment by rideontime

6 hours ago

Days after the fake story about Cursor building a web browser from scratch with GPT-5.2 was debunked. Disbelief should be the default reaction to stories like this.

54 comments

rideontime

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embedding-shape  6 hours ago

Btw, after I wrote that initial article ("Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence"), I gave it my own try to write a browser from scratch with just one agent, using no 3rd party crates, only commonly available system libraries, and just made a Show HN about it: https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser

  • noosphr  5 hours ago

    Yes, this is what Ai assisted coding is good at.

    A poc that would usually take a team of engineers weeks to make because of lack of cross disciplinary skills can now be done by one at the cost of long term tech debt because of lack of cross disciplinary knowledge.

    • embedding-shape  3 hours ago

      > Yes, this is what Ai assisted coding is good at.

      This is where I wish we spent more energy, figuring out better ways to work with the AI, rather than trying replace some parts wholesale with AI. Wrote a bunch more specifically about that, while I was watching the agent work on the browser itself, here: https://emsh.cat/good-taste/ (it's like a companion-piece I guess)

  • dwroberts  5 hours ago

    Would be interested to know what people think of the locking implementation for the net worker pool.

    I’m no expert but it seems like a strange choice to me - using a mutex around an MPSC receiver, so whoever locks first gets to block until they get a message.

    Is that not introducing unnecessary contention? It wouldn’t be that hard to just retain a sender for each worker and just round robin them

    • comex  3 hours ago

      I haven’t looked at the code, but what you’re describing doesn’t sound that bad. If the queue is empty then it doesn’t matter whether a worker is waiting on the lock or waiting on the receiver itself. If the queue is non-empty then whoever has the lock will soon complete the receive and release the lock. It would be better to just use an actual MPMC channel, but if the traffic on the queue isn’t too high then it probably doesn’t make a significant difference. With round robin in contrast, the sender would risk sending a job to a worker that was already busy, unless it took additional measures to avoid that.

    • storystarling  2 hours ago

      I suspect this is just an LLM hallucinating generic thread-safety boilerplate. In an async serverless runtime like Workers this pattern creates blocking risks and doesn't actually solve the distributed consistency problem.

oefrha  6 hours ago

The outrageous part of this is nowhere in the blog post or the repository indicates it's vibe coded garbage (hopefully I didn't miss it?). You expect some level of bullshit in AI company's latest AI vibe coding announcements. This can be mistaken for a classical blog post.

Although the tell is obvious if you spent one second looking at https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers. That misaligned ASCII diagram, damn.

Why is Cloudflare paying this guy again, just to vibe a bunch of garbage without even checking above the fold content in the README?

  • rconti  5 hours ago

    > Why is Cloudflare paying this guy again

    Perhaps usage of AI is a performance target he's being judged against, like at many tech companies today.

  • embedding-shape  6 hours ago

    > A production-grade Matrix homeserver implementation

    It's getting outright frustrating to deal with this.

    Fine, random hype-men gets hyped about stuff and tweets about it, doesn't mind me too much.

    Huge companies who used to have a lot of good will putting out stuff like this, seemingly with absolutely zero reviews before hitting publish? What are they doing? Have everyone decided to just give up and give in to the slop? We need "engineering" to make a comeback.

bentcorner  6 hours ago

I get vibe coding a feature or news story or whatnot but how do you go about not even checking if the thing actually works, or fact checking the blog post?

  • heliumtera  6 hours ago

    Optics is the only thing that matters, there are people genuinely pushing for vibe coding on production systems. Actually, all of the big companies are doing this and claiming it is MORE safe because reduces human error.

    I'm starting to believe they are all right, actually. Maybe frontier models surpassed most humans, but the bar we should have for humans is really really low. I genuinely believe most people cannot distinguish llms capabilities from their own capabilities, and their are not wrong from the perspective they have.

    How could you perceive, out in the wild, an essence that scapes you?

blibble  6 hours ago

it seems as if literally everyone associated with "AI" is a grifter, shill (sorry, "Independent Researcher"), temporarily embarrassed billionaire, or just a flat out scammer

I have yet to see a counter-example

  • PurpleRamen  5 hours ago

    I would not rule out that sometimes they are just incompetent and believe their own story, because they just don't know it better. Seems this is called a "bad apple"?

  • heliumtera  6 hours ago

    Everyone (not really, but basically yes) associated with $current_thing is a rent seeking scammer.

    Even if Blockchain has tremendous impact, even if transformers are incredible (really) technology, even if NFTs could solve real world problems...you could basically say the same thing and be right, rounding up, 100% of the time, about anything technology related (and everything else as well). This truly is a clown world, but it is illegal to challenge it (or considered bad faith around here)

themafia  2 hours ago

It's clear that on Hacker News many people have made absurdly deep investments into this "technology." There's going to be a long period of pearl clutching we have to dig out of until we get back to the standard hacker ethic of not believing anything published by corporations.

ronsor  6 hours ago

They did build a browser; it may not be a very compliant or complete browser, or even a useful one, but neither was IE6!

  • s1mplicissimus  6 hours ago

    It didn't even compile, which makes me consider wether your comment is just ignorant or outright maliciously misleading

    • simonw  6 hours ago

      The version that was live on GitHub the day they published their blog post was missing compilation instructions, didn't cleanly compile and didn't pass GitHub Actions CI.

      The project itself did compile most of the time it was being developed - the coding agents had been compiling it the whole time they were running on it.

      Shortly after the blog post they updated the GitHub repo with compilation instructions and it worked. I took this screenshot with it: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cursor-simonwil...

      The "it didn't even compile" criticism is valid in pointing out that they messed up the initial release, but if you think "it never compiled" you have an incorrect mental model.

      3 replies →

  • nerdsniper  6 hours ago

    I believe it was basically a broken, non-functioning wrapper around Servo internals. That’s what I’d expect from a high schooler who says “i wrote a web browser”, but not what I’d expect from a multi-billion dollar corporation.

    • corvad  6 hours ago

      They aren't really a multi-billion dollar corporation. A lot of it is them just pumping up their valuation. Stuff like this proves that in a lot of ways.

      3 replies →