One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOC
3 points by typesanitizer
3 points by typesanitizer
That is really impressive, but:
Turns out one agent driven by a talented engineer, three days and 20,000 lines of Rust is enough to get a very solid basic renderer working!
I wonder to what extent they were already familiar with the problem space - since to validate LLMs output, you need to have the knowledge & understanding of both the tools - programming languages, libraries, dependencies and so on - as well as the problem you are solving.
So while AI-assisted coding is powerful, I guess it just reinforces the idea that it is a force multiplier for those who are competent already; and not much of a help for newbies.
I'm the author of the original post (https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/) that Simon's post is about.
I'm very familiar with web development, been doing it close to two decades at this point, maybe one decade professionally. But almost always in the context of developing websites, only once close to browser internals (back when Firefox extensions were XUL I think), so I don't know how they work internally, nor do I know X11 at all (or any of the system frameworks/libraries used for Windows and macOS). In this context, I basically just know what to expect.
For Windows and macOS, I basically prompted "We have this thing, it works on X11, what would it take to fulfill the constraints and requirements and make it work for $platform", then I got some options, and picked one path, let the agent implement what I chose.
I think what really helped here though, is that I've spent countless of hours and energy on focusing on high quality testing, architecture/design and communication between human beings, which could probably have given me an edge here. I also think "Good Taste" is extremely important for this sort of work, I've written a bunch more about what that exactly means here: https://emsh.cat/good-taste/
that it is a force multiplier for those who are competent already; and not much of a help for newbies.
Yeah, this I very much agree with, and the "Good Taste" article I put earlier, ends on a similar note :) At the state they're at now, they're not gonna make non-software engineers into software engineers, but it will make current skilled software engineers be able to do better and wider range of stuff.
On another note, I'm working on making all the session logs public, so everyone can browse them at their own leisure (peril), then it should be very clear what exactly I knew, vs just let the agent do.
They've said on HN there's no way they could've accomplished this on their own, so I take this to mean they weren't too familiar with the problem space.