Scaling long-running autonomous coding

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.

So AI makes it cheaper to remix anything already-seen, or anything with a stable pattern, if you’re willing to throw enough resources at it.

AI makes it cheap (eventually almost free) to traverse the already-discovered and reach the edge of uncharted territory. If we think of a sphere, where we start at the center, and the surface is the edge of uncharted territory, then AI lets you move instantly to the surface.

If anything solved becomes cheap to re-instantiate, does R&D reach a point where it can’t ever pay off? Why would one pay for the long-researched thing when they can get it for free tomorrow? There will be some value in having it today, just like having knowledge about a stock today is more valuable than the same knowledge learned tomorrow. But does value itself go away for anything digital, and only remain for anything non-copyable?

The volume of a sphere grows faster than the surface area. But if traversing the interior is instant and frictionless, what does that imply?

Well, software is measured over time. The devil is always in the details.

That's a wild idea-a browser from scratch! And ladybird has been moving at snails pace for a long time..

I think a good abstractions design and good test suite will make it break success of future coding projects.

I am waiting for that guy or a team that uses LLMs to write the most optimal version of Windows in existence, something that even surpasses what Microsoft has done over the years and honestly looking at the current state of Windows 11, it really feels like it shouldn't even be that hard to make something more user friendly