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Imustaskforhelp 11 hours ago

I feel like I have talked to Embedding-shape on Hackernews quite a lot that I recognize him. So it was a proud like moment when I saw his hackernews & github comments on a youtube video [0]about the recent cursor thing

It's great to see him make this. I didn't know that he had a blog but looks good to me. Bookmarked now.

I feel like although Cursor burned 5 million$, we saw that and now Embedding shapes takeaway

If one person with one agent can produce equal or better results than "hundreds of agents for weeks", then the answer to the question: "Can we scale autonomous coding by throwing more agents at a problem?", probably has a more pessimistic answer than some expected.

Effectively to me this feels like answering the query which was being what if we have thousands of AI agents who can build a complex project autonomously with no Human. That idea seems dead now. Humans being in the loop will have a much higher productivity and end result.

I feel like the lure behind the Cursor project was to find if its able to replace humans completely in a extremely large project and the answer's right now no (and I have a feeling [bias?] that the answer's gonna stay that way)

Emsh I have a question tho, can you tell me about your background if possible? Have you been involved in browser development or any related endeavours or was this a first new one for you? From what I can feel/have talked with you, I do feel like the answer's yes that you have worked in browser space but I am still curious to know the answer.

A question which is coming to my mind is how much would be the difference between 1 expert human 1 agent and 1 (non expert) say Junior dev human 1 agent and 1 completely non expert say a normal person/less techie person 1 agent go?

What are your guys prediction on it?

How would the economics of becoming an "expert" or becoming a jack of all trades (junior dev) in a field fare with this new technology/toy that we got.

how much productivity gains could be from 1 non expert -> junior dev and the same question for junior -> senior dev in this particular context

[0] Cursor Is Lying To Developers… : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7s_CaI93Mo

simonw 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think the Cursor thing was about replacing humans entirely.

(If it was that's bad news for them as a company that sells tools to human developers!)

It was about scaling coding agents up to much larger projects by coordinating and running them in parallel. They chose a web browser for that not because they wanted to build a web browser, but because it seemed like the ideal example of a well specified but enormous (million line+) project which multiple parallel agents could take on where a single agent wouldn't be able to make progress.

embedding-shape's project here disproves that last bit - that you need parallel agents to build a competent web renderer - by achieving a more impressive result with just one Codex agent in a few days.

Imustaskforhelp 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> I don't think the Cursor thing was about replacing humans entirely.

I think how I saw things was that somehow Cursor was/is still targetted very heavily on vibe coding in a similar fashion of bolt.dev or lovable and I even saw some vibe coders youtube try to see the difference and honestly at the end Cursor had a preferable pricing than the other two and that's how I felt Cursor was.

Of course Cursor's for the more techie person as well but I feel as if they would shift more and more towards Claude Code or similar which are subsidized by the provider (Anthropic) itself, something not possible for Cursor to do unless burning big B's which it already has done.

So Cursor's growth was definitely towards the more vibe coders side.

Now coming to my main point which is that I had the feeling that what cursor was trying to achieve wasn't trying to replace humans entirely but replace humans from the loop Aka Vibe coding. Instead of having engineers, if suppose the Cursor experiment was sucessful, the idea (which people felt when it was first released instantly) was that the engineering itself would've been dead & instead the jobs would've turned into management from a bird's eye view (not managing agent's individually or being aware of what they did or being in any capacity within the loop)

I feel like this might've been the reason they were willing to burn 5 million$ for.

If you could've been able to convince engineers considering browsers are taken as the holy grail of hardness that they are better off being managers, then a vibe coding product like Cursor would be really lucrative.

Atleast that's my understanding, I can be wrong I usually am and I don't have anything against Cursor. (I actually used to use Cursor earlier)

But the embedding shapes project shows that engineering is very much still alive and beneficial net. He produced a better result with very minimal costs than 5 million$ inference costs project.

> embedding-shape's project here disproves that last bit - that you need parallel agents to build a competent web renderer - by achieving a more impressive result with just one Codex agent in a few days.

Simon, I think that browsers got the idea of this autonomous agents partially because of your really famous post about how independent tests can lead to easier ports via agents. Browsers have a lot of independent tests.

So Simon, perhaps I may have over-generalized but do you know of any ideas where the idea of parallel agents is actually good now that browsers are off, personally after this project, I can't really think of any. When the Cursor thing first launched or when I first heard of it recently, I thought that browsers did make sense for some reason but now that its out of the window, I am not sure if there are any other projects where massively parallel agents might be even net positive over 1 human + 1 agent as Emsh.

simonw 10 hours ago | parent [-]

No, I'm still waiting to see concrete evidence that the "swarms of parallel agents" thing is worthwhile. I use sub-agents in Claude Code occasionally - for problems that are easily divided - and that works fine as a speed-up, but I'm still holding out for an example of a swarm of agents that's really compelling.

The reason I got excited about the Cursor FastRender example was that it seemed like the first genuine example of thousands of agents achieving something that couldn't be achieved in another way... and then embedding-shapes went and undermined it with 20,000 lines of single-agent Rust!

Imustaskforhelp 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Edit 2: looks like the project took literally the last token I had to create a big buggy implementation in golang haha!

I kind of left the agents to do what they wanted just asking for a port.

Your website does look rotated and the image is the only thing visible in my golang port.

Let me open source it & I will probably try to hammer it some more after I wake up to see how good Kimi is in real world tasks.

https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/golang-browser

I must admit that its not working right now and I am even unable to replicate your website that was able to first display even though really glitchy and image zoomed to now only a white although oops looks like I forgot the i in your name and wrote willson instead of willison as I wasn't wearing specs. Sorry about that

Now Let me see yeah now its displaying something which is extremely glitchy

https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/golang-browser/blob/mai...

I have a file to show how glitchy it is. I mean If anything I just want someone to tinker around with if a golang project can reasonably be made out of this rust project.

Simon, I see that you were also interested in go vibe coding haha, this project has independent tests too! Perhaps you can try this out as well and see how it goes! It would be interesting to see stuff then!

Alright time for me to sleep now, good night!

Imustaskforhelp 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Haha yea, Me and emsh were actually talking about it on bluesky (which I saw after seeing your bluesky, I didn't know both you and emsh were on bsky haha)

https://bsky.app/profile/emsh.cat/post/3mdgobfq4as2p

But basically I got curious and you can see from my other comments on you how much I love golang so decided to port the project from rust to golang and emsh predicts that the project's codebase can even shrink to 10k!

(although one point tho is that I don't have CC, I am trying it out on the recently released Kimi k2.5 model and their code but I decided to use that to see the real world use case of an open source model as well!)

Edit: I had written this comment just 2 minutes before you wrote but then I decided to write the golang project

I mean, I think I ate through all of my 200 queries in kimi code & it now does display me a (browser?) and I had the shell script as something to test your website as the test but it only opens up blank

I am gonna go sleep so that the 5 hour limits can get recharged again and I will continue this project.

I think it will be really interesting to see this project in golang, there must be good reason for emsh to say the project can be ~10k in golang.