zlacker

[return to "Scaling long-running autonomous coding"]
1. simonw+vf[view] [source] 2026-01-20 02:56:02
>>srames+(OP)
One of the big open questions for me right now concerns how library dependencies are used.

Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO.

The two that stand out for me as more notable are html5ever for parsing HTML and taffy for handling CSS grids and flexbox - that's vendored with an explanation of some minor changes here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e...

Taffy a solid library choice, but it's probably the most robust ammunition for anyone who wants to argue that this shouldn't count as a "from scratch" rendering engine.

I don't think it detracts much if at all from FastRender as an example of what an army of coding agents can help a single engineer achieve in a few weeks of work.

◧◩
2. embedd+WY[view] [source] 2026-01-20 10:17:09
>>simonw+vf
For me, the biggest open question is currently "How autonomous is 'autonomous'?" because the commits make it clear there were multiple actors involved in contributing to the repository, and the timing/merges make it seem like a human might have been involved with choosing what to merge (but hard to know 100%) and also making smaller commits of their own. I'm really curious to understand what exactly "It ran uninterrupted for one week" means, which was one of Cursor's claims.

I've reached out to the engineer who seemed to have run the experiment, who hopefully can shed some more light on it and (hopefully) my update to >>46646777 will include the replies and more investigations.

[go to top]