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Comment by quux | Hacker News Reader

Ladybird has been really shaping up over the last month or so, I pull and build the latest bits every morning and use it for low stakes web browsing (HN, news sites, reddit, youtube, blogs, etc.) and it's getting very close to the point where I forget that it's a pre-alpha.

Very exciting to watch a completely new browser/browser engine come together. Reminds me of the early days of Mozilla and Gecko

Posted with Ladybird :)

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I suspect in a year or so, an entire browser can be prompted by AI and then it won’t feel all that cool anymore. Unless AI hits a wall soon (unlikely).

I've actually used AI to create a WebKit port (not an original browser). The amazing thing is that it worked--but it still took months of issue triage. Even when the AI was working on its own, it had to spend enormous amounts of time just on compiling and testing. There are so many moving pieces, and each individual issue could mean the AI spinning for days.

Even if a future AI can drive web browser development completely autonomously, I suspect it will take a huge amount of real-world time because that's just the shape of the work no matter how "smart" you are.

Yep, I've been building a custom H2/H3 server for nearly 6 months now maxing my Claude 200 plan every week. Very pleased with the results but it's definitely not a quick or cheap task, it's constant decision fatigue and tons of rigorous testing on every piece in turn. Fuzzing, mutation testing, Miri, protocol conformance suites, H2load, actual networked runs, so on and so on.

I mean it worked, if scaling doesn’t stop and it can do this non stop at GPT Ultra speeds, this whole task will be done in weeks, maybe lesser. Doesn’t refute my point, ladybird is unfortunately going to be a pointless project soon. Though I guess if you have fun, who cares.

No, because the bottleneck isn't just model speed. The model has to literally compile the engine and run the massive test suites. Some of that could be sped up if you had a real build farm instead of my little computer, but there's a limit to how much you can parallelize things. And remember, I was porting WebKit, not remaking it, which would be orders of magnitude more work.

So you're not going to get to "build me an original web browser from scratch, make no mistakes" and get a new app the next morning or even next week, I don't think.

I'm doing a web browser from scratch, no web or js engine reused (only general-purpose libraries allowed), in my spare time/tokens on a Claude $100 sub.

After a month or so, many simple sites work, and now the bottleneck is the stupid amount of JS sites use for everything, and Cloudflare which doesn't like someone using a non-officially-approved browser.

Absolutely not a replacement for Chrome or Ladybird, but it can be done already.

Why is it that no conversation can be had about anything without AI being shoehorned into it, what did the parent comment even have to do with this

AI is trained on human works. The preferences Ladybird expresses will influence those browsers.

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