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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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