very impressive!

it's amazing how far we've come in 20 years. i was a (very minor) contributor to khtml/konqueror (before apple got involved w/ webkit) in the early 2000s, and back then it was such a labor intensive process to even create a halfway working engine. like, months of work just to get basic rendering somewhat correct on a very small portion of the web (which was obv much smaller)

in addition to agentic coding, i think for this specific task having css-spec/html-spec/web-platform-tests as machine readable test suites helps a LOT. the agent can actually validate against real specs.

back in the day, despite having gecko as an open source reference, in practice the "standards" were whatever IE was doing. so you'd spend weeks implementing something only to discover every site was coded for IE's quirks lmao. for all of their other faults, google/apple and other contributors helped bring in discipline to that.

▲

embedding-shape 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> i think for this specific task having css-spec/html-spec/web-platform-tests as machine readable test suites helps a LOT

You know, I placed the specs in the repository with that goal (even sneaked in a repo that needs compiling before being usable), but as far as I can see, the agent never actually peeked into that directory nor read anything from them in the end.

It'll be easier to see once I made all the agent sessions public, and I might be wrong (I didn't observe the agent at all times), but seems the agent never used though.

	▲	bhadass 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		oh interesting, so it just... didn't use them? lol. i guess the model's training data already has enough web knowledge baked in that it could wing it. curious if explicitly prompting it to reference the specs would change the output quality or time to solution. very excited to see the agentic sessions when you release them.. that kind of transparency is super valuable for the community. i can see "build a browser from scratch" becoming a popular challenge as people explore the limits of agentic coding and try to figure out best practices for workflows/prompting. like the new "build a ray tracer" or say nanogtp but for agents.