Scaling long-running autonomous coding
January 20, 2026
In my predictions for 2026 the other day I said that by 2029:
I think somebody will have built a full web browser mostly using AI assistance, and it won’t even be surprising. Rolling a new web browser is one of the most complicated software projects I can imagine[…] the cheat code is the conformance suites. If there are existing tests that it’ll get so much easier.
I may have been off by three years, because Cursor chose “building a web browser from scratch” as their test case for their agent swarm approach:
I’m surprised this hasn’t gained more notice over the last couple of days. I know a thing or two about web browsers and web technology. I’ve splunked the source code of mobile browsers going back over many years. I’m not even remotely capable of contributing a line of code to any modern browsers, but I do have a sense of what they have to do to render even the most basic web page. From the network layer all the way up to the rendering layer and beyond.
Now, this is not going to compete with Google Chrome. It’s not going to be your daily driver, but it’s an extraordinary example of just how capable modern large language model code generating systems have become in a very short period.
I don’t think we’ve begun to digest the implications of this. Not as software engineers for our practise and profession, but for the economy. A decade or so ago, Mark Andresen said “Software is eating the world.” What’s happening now? And what will happen in the coming months and small number of years?
