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Just for context, this was the original claim by Cursor's CEO on Twitter:

> We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

> It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

> It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

https://xcancel.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552#m


Has anyone tried to rewrite some popular open source project with IA? I imagine modern LLMs can be very effective at license-washing/plagiarizing dependencies, it could be an interesting new benchmark too


I think it's fair enough to consider porting a subset of rewriting, in which case there are several successful experiments out there:

- JustHTML [1], which in practice [2] is a port of html5ever [3] to Python.

- justjshtml, which is a port of JustHTML to JavaScript :D [4].

- MiniJinja [5] was recently ported to Go [6].

All three projects have one thing in common: comprehensive test suites which were used to guardrail and guide AI.

References:

1. https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml

2. https://friendlybit.com/python/writing-justhtml-with-coding-...

3. https://github.com/servo/html5ever

4. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

5. https://github.com/mitsuhiko/minijinja

6. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/14/minijinja-go-port/


As the author, it's a stretch to say that JustHTML is a port of html5ever. While you're right that this was part of the initial prompt, the code is very different, which is typically not what counts as "port". Your mileage may wary.


Interesting, IIUC the transformer architecture / attention mechanism were initially designed for use in the language translation domain. Maybe after peeling back a few layers, that's still all they're really doing.


This has long been how I have explained LLMs to non-technical people: text transformation engines. To some extent, many common, tedious, activities basically constitute a transformation of text into one well known form from another (even some kinds of reasoning are this) and so LLMs are very useful. But they just transform text between well known forms.


And while it appears that lots of problems can be contorted into translation, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Maybe we do hit a brick wall unless we can come up with a model that more closely aligns with actual human reasoning.


Note that it's not clear that any of the JustHTML ports were actually ports per se, as in the end they all ended up with very different implementations. Instead, it might just be that an LLM generated roughly the same library several different times.

See https://felix.dognebula.com/art/html-parsers-in-portland.htm...


More vibe coded browser modules:

V8 => H8 - JavaScript engine that hates code, misunderstands equality, sponsored by Brendan Eich and "Yes on Prop H8".

Expat => Vexpat - An annoying, irritating rewrite of an XML parser.

libxml2 => libxmlpoo - XML parsing, same quality as the spec.

libxslt => libxsalt - XSLT transforms with extra salt in the wound.

Protobuf => Probabuf - Probably serializes correctly, probably not, fuzzy logic.

Cap'n Proto => Crap'n Proto - Zero-copy, zero quality.

cURL => cHURL - Throws requests violently serverward, projectile URLemitting.

SDL => STD - Sexually Transmitted Dependency. It never leaves and spreads bugs to everything you touch.

Servo => Swervo - Drunk, wobbly layout that can't stay on the road.

WebKit => WebShite - British pronunciation, British quality control.

Blink => Blinkered - Only renders pages it agrees with politically.

Taffy => Daffy - Duck typed Flexbox layout that's completely unhinged. "You're dethpicable!"

html5ever => html5never - Servo's HTML parser that never finishes tokenizing.

Skia => SkAI - AI-generated graphics that hallucinates extra pixels and fingers.

FreeType => FreeTypo - Introduces typos during keming and rasterization.

Firefox => Foxfire - Burns through your battery in 12 minutes, while molesting children.

WebGL => WebGLitch - Shader compilation errors as art.

WebGPU => WebGPUke - Makes your GPU physically ill.

SQLite => SQLHeavy - Embedded database, 400MB per query.

Vulkan => Vulcan't - Low-level graphics that can't.

Clang => Clanger - Drops errors loudly at runtime.

libevent => liebevent - Event library that lies about readiness.

Opus => Oops - Audio codec, "oops, your audio's gone."

All modules now available on GitPub:

GitHub => GitPub - Microsoft's vibe control system optimized for the Ballmer Peak. Commit quality peaks at 0.129% BAC, mass reverts at 0.15%.


Not me personally, but a GitHub user wrote a replacement for Go's regexp library that was "up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib": https://github.com/coregx/coregex ... at first I was impressed, so started testing it and reporting bugs, but as soon as I ran my own benchmarks, it all fell apart (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/29). After some mostly-bot updates, that issue was closed. But someone else opened a very similar one recently (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/79) -- same deal, "actually, it's slower than the stdlib in my tests". Basically AI slop with poor tests, poor benchmarks, and way oversold. How he's positioning these projects is the problematic bit, I reckon, not the use of AI.

Same user did a similar thing by creating an AWK interpreter written in Go using LLMs: https://github.com/kolkov/uawk -- as the creator of (I think?) the only AWK interpreter written in Go (https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk), I was curious. It turns out that if there's only one item in the training data (GoAWK), AI likes to copy and paste freely from the original. But again, it's poorly tested and poorly benchmarked.

I just don't see how one can get quality like this, without being realistic about code review, testing, and benchmarking.


> up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib

Note that this is semantically exactly equivalent to "up to 3000x faster than stdlib" and doesn't actually claim any particular actual speedup since "up to" denotes an upper bound, not a lower bound or expected value. It’s standard misleading-but-not-technically-false marketing language to create a false impression because people tend to focus on the number and ignore the "up to".


When you say "up to" about a list of data points, it's not just a bound. At least one has to reach that amount or it's a lie.


With the “up to 3-3000x+” language the plus leaves us with the entire number line.


Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/870/


Saying “up to” means that bound is the maximum value of the data set. It may be far from the median value, but it is included (or you’re lying). With any other interpretation the phrase has no meaning whatsoever.


I will concede, proactively, that "up to" could refer to some maximum possible bound, even if the current set doesn't include a value at that bound, though I would argue that's likely deceptive wording. For example, you could say that each carton of of eggs on a pallet contains up to 12 eggs, because that's the maximum capacity of the carton, even if none of the actual cartons on this pallet actually have 12 eggs in them.


3000x Faster Optimized Random Number Generator: https://xkcd.com/221/


Oh yeah, I recognize this guy. The author of most commits in coregex posted his vibecoded projects to Reddit.

I've looked at his other repos and it's the same shit. Responses are also quite funny, does he not realize this reads like the worst of AI?


To be fair, good benchmarking is hard, most people get it wrong. Scientific training helps.


I used one of the assistants to reverse and rewrite a browser-hosted JS game-like app to desktop Rust. It required a lot of steering but it was pretty useful.


I think you are confusing The Dark Project, which is the first game of the Thief series from 1998, with some mod or maybe The Dark Mod? :)


Gaaaah, words. Yes thank you ! Coz in another thread I was mentioning both.

The above post -which I can no longer edit- compares The Black Parade / TBP (a mod for Thief I / The Dark Project / TDP) to The Dark Mod (TDM, a mod for the doom3 engine). Phew :D

As for the original question of comparing TBP to TDP: I’m personally not fond of Thief I and prefer Thief II, as it focuses on what works: stealth! Thief I is wildly creative, but also full of muddy combat with unconvincing monsters & zombies, and annoying maps / missions. So, to me, TBP (which is pleasingly weird and avoids TDP gameplay pitfalls) kinda beats its parent game TDP at its own game.


CNN interviewed Stephen Miller last night:

Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509694

Here is a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tidejP41CBk


The Home License for personal, non-commercial use, moved to an annual subscription model:

https://uk.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html?prodcode=HOM...

I am very sad because I was awaiting for my Learn & Development budget at work to renew to get a license to use the Antenna Toolbox :_(


Thanks for mentioning this project, I have been looking for a good reverb plugin for Linux for a while now and this sounds great.


There might be a plugin based on freeverb, which is also a good sounding one. I ohave it as a logue unit, so can't recommend one immediately. At least I know greybox based on actual device comparison, as he owns one and has been doing this for 5 years sans AI.


Here is a link for those like me who have not read Article 5 before, with additional comments:

https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/coll...


Given that Big Tech is training AI on copyrighted material downloaded from shadow library torrents it's safe to assume that they don't care about licenses at all.

Plus the US government is pro Big Tech and they will protect them at all cost.


it strikes me as a dangerous time to try going to court over this as politics are currently aligned to fight back with new laws overriding court interpretations, at least in the US. God knows what's happening in China; afaik, it's a free-for-all outside requirements to avoid "sensitive topics". Between US and China, you have nearly all of the "top 100" LLMs.


It's intermittent for me now, some requests go through if I refresh enough times, but no incident according to the status page still...


Many thing are "here to stay", should Mozilla also implement a "share with TikTok" functionality into their browser?

> or get left behind.

Last time I heard this phrase it was about VR, and before that it was NFTs. I wished the tech community wasn't so susceptible to FOMO sentiments.


Indeed. I never understood, let alone bought into, the NFT hype, but I think VR is a good reference point for AI:

There was a real, genuine product in the Oculus Rift. It did something that was an incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.

The Metaverse was laughable, and VR got glued to a lot of things where it added zero value, or worse negative value, for example my attempts to watch pre-recorded 3D video gave me nausea because the camera can only rotate, not displace, with my head movements.

Compare and contrast with AI:

LLMs and Diffusion models are also real, genuine products, that are incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.

A lot of the attempts to integrate these AI have been laughable, and have added zero-to-negative value.


Non corporate VR is actually doing some interesting things - but yeah, what Meta did with it was pure garbage.


I didn't mean it as VR being useless - I'm sure it can be useful for some applications or fun for gaming - my point was that you shouldn't fear getting left behind just for not having an Apple Vision Pro app or a land in the Metaverse :)

Another way to see this: Hammers can be useful, the Internet can be useful, but this doesn't mean that as a hammer manufacturer you should make your next hammer an IoT product ASAP or you will be left behind.


Well stated, agreed. :)

Just wanted to note that even after the bad publicity that companies like Meta (ugly avatars, unusable bland virtual spaces) or Apple (overpriced device with no software or content) have given to VR, some people tend to regard it as dead even though there is quite a vibrant user and creator community doing some incredible things (even just what people do with VRChat is amazing!). And there are even companies that seem to get it (Valve).


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