I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.
But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth.
> I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.
I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law
And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024:
How many non developers were going to look at that? They knew exactly what they were doing by saying that.
> But it was accompanied by a link to the GitHub repo, so you can hardly claim that they were deliberately hiding the truth.
Well, yes and no; we live in an era where people consume headlines, not articles, and certainly not links to Github repositories in articles. If VCs and other CEOs read the headline "Cursor Agents Autonomously Create Web Browser From Scratch" on LinkedIn, the project has served its purpose and it really doesn't matter if the code compiles or not.
Sorry, just to be clear, the defense that they pulled something out of their ass is that they linked to something that outed them? So they couldn't have actually have been overstating it?
If anything, that proves the point that they weren't rigorous! They claimed a thing. The thing didn't accomplish what they said. I'm not saying that they hid it but that they misrepresented the thing that they built. My comment to you is that the interview didn't directly firmly pressure them on this.
Generating a million lines of code in parallel isn't impressive. Burning a mountain of resources in parallel isn't noteworthy (see: the weekly post of someone with an out of control EC2 instance racking up $100k of charges.)
It would have been remarkable if they'd built a browser from scratch, which they said they did, except they didn't. It was a 50 million token hackathon project that didn't work, dressed up as a groundbreaking example of their product.
As feedback, I hope in the future you'll push back firmly on these types of claims when given the opportunity, even if it makes the interviewee uncomfy. Incredible claims require incredible evidence. They didn't have it.