This makes a ton of sense to me with the huge corpus of web standards that exist. In theory we should be able to generate a browser from those specs, it just took a massive amount of effort before. Maybe if things like this get some traction, some of the human time spent implementing the spec could be spent on creating more/better specs, allowing for even better generation too.
Edit: replies are making good points about AI capabilities and where the effort really goes. Let’s just say that I meant this in an aspirational sense, rather than where the rubber actually meets the road today.
As someone who has spent the last 3 years implementing a browser engine from scratch full time (that currently passes ~half the 200k "css" tests that test style/layout/rendering), I find that (without a lot of close hand holding) the AIs are very far from being able to do this. They'll give you something that passes the tests, but it will do it a ridiculous way be far too slow to be useful (and is wrong architecturally such that it's not going to converge on a better solution).
I recognize the feeling of handholding and have the tingles telling me that given the step change of Opus 5.5 and what passed by in the news lately, agent swarms are about to become mainstream. That's exactly what a project like this would use. I think everybody will be able to create their own engine and out of the ones who try, a few will actually make gains beyond what's available in parts of the engine.
It's a matter of "bring the best non-conflicting wins together" at that point. The existing engines are too big to flip over their codebase without having seen competitors prove it too.
My estimate is that with the release of Opus 5.7, companies need to have their shit together because the work ecosystem will flip over at 6 at the current rate of progress. This generation is the first one that delivers local applications with a better toolset than a small scale SaaS in hours to days.
Alacart · · focus · HN ↗
Edit: replies are making good points about AI capabilities and where the effort really goes. Let’s just say that I meant this in an aspirational sense, rather than where the rubber actually meets the road today.
nicoburns · · focus · HN ↗
toonvanvr · · focus · HN ↗
It's a matter of "bring the best non-conflicting wins together" at that point. The existing engines are too big to flip over their codebase without having seen competitors prove it too.
My estimate is that with the release of Opus 5.7, companies need to have their shit together because the work ecosystem will flip over at 6 at the current rate of progress. This generation is the first one that delivers local applications with a better toolset than a small scale SaaS in hours to days.