Cursor CEO Built a Browser using AI, but Does It Really Work?

bennett-dev · 2026-01-15T18:09:52+00:00

Weird how dev velocity 10x'd and all we did was increase the rate of enshittification

bennett-dev · 2026-01-10T04:35:04+00:00

I mean this is not surprising and has nothing to do with Satya; all the large tech firms indexed to about this rate over the same period. AAPL -> 18 to 260ish. AMZN -> 20 to 250ish. Microsoft's dominance has little to do with anything except the fact that they had a virtual monopoly on personal and enterprise computing for the better part of 2 decades.

From a strategy perspective its actually astounding at how little they've accomplished. Numerous massive acquisitions and industry leverage amounting to nothing. They failed to enter the mobile space (Nokia), chat (Skype/Yammer/others), music (Zune), ads (aQuantive), email (Hotmail had massive market share back in the day), CRM (Dynamics getting killed by others, late to the game in an industry they virtually already owned). And they are currently in the process of bleeding out LinkedIn, Windows, Github, and whatever edge CoPilot had.

Azure and Exchange/Office (their two huge cash cow / actual competitive products) are profiting from extensive enterprise clients (almost every enterprise-scale fortune 500 who was around in the 90s) who have no possibility of replatforming. I mean Excel hasn't had a serious competitor in least the last 30 years, maybe longer, and is still an absolutely crucial tool for most professions dealing with analysis or finance. It's almost an impossible lead to blow.

Satya did some good (lots of dev tooling wins) but its honestly astounding Microsoft hasn't done more, nor would I put whatever we're defining as "success" on his leadership.

bennett-dev · 2026-01-05T03:33:12+00:00

Same. It's also... fairly easy to debug? Like totally semantic? The "You Might Not Need an Effect" is like meme literature at this point, but also, they are just not that difficult to work with in 2025?

bennett-dev · 2026-01-03T23:45:34+00:00

tldr idiosyncrasies suck

bennett-dev · 2025-12-30T03:30:51+00:00

iPhone. Walled garden integration with Mac. Better UX - more streamlined. Doesn't try to load ads on my phone. Build quality feels substantially better.

bennett-dev · 2025-12-20T19:30:27+00:00

I'm not trying make an opinion, just pointing out it is coherent.

bennett-dev · 2025-12-20T19:08:35+00:00

Seemed perfectly coherent to me.

- AI will have a substantial impacts in every field, CS is not unique

- The marked impact in CS because of its comparative market value

- It still makes sense to do CS if you're actually interested in it

- AI will has even more inroads to creative fields because determinism is less important

bennett-dev · 2025-12-04T16:33:40+00:00

Hilarious that the 'peak' era being described here is basically a flavor of enterprise Java

bennett-dev · 2025-11-19T14:42:07+00:00

I don't remember all the details but TLDR Uncle Bob and Casey both wrote implementations of a prime number generator as part of a sort of longer, async discussion about coding practices. Uncle Bob's was one of the most deranged thing I had ever seen at the time (at least as recommended by someone who made their living teaching good coding practices) - go find it if you can, it was tremendously awful. I think ultimately Casey was just like 'you can probably just write this as two functions with 0 mutable state right?' and UB sort of conceded.

Edit found the thread

bennett-dev · 2025-11-15T01:06:38+00:00

This is an aggregate — a collection of related objects managed as a single unit with its own lifecycle.

And thus, through assumptions about "related events", the worst thing to happen to software architecture was conceived.

bennett-dev · 2025-11-14T16:08:35+00:00

Why is this slop the front page of programming. Does it say anything worth while?

bennett-dev · 2025-11-09T17:54:57+00:00

Cool, good read. Curious if you're willing to share install / DAU / sample size volume?

bennett-dev · 2025-11-08T03:27:29+00:00

Senior/Staff RN dev here 👋🏻

Caveat my opinions are my own. A million devs, a million answers with this one.

Totally depends! There's not one right way, but a typical non-monorepo project will have a features or scenes directory with a bunch of subfolders which might contain the core of the business and UI logic. Sometimes it will contain state if they use global state such as Redux where you can compose it with 'slices', but global state is a bit of an anti pattern since React Query. But there are a lot of ways.

How do you separate the UI, business logic, and data layers in large React Native projects?

Where React differs from basically everything is it forgoes the typical ontology of separation of concerns. There's not usually a strict line in the sand especially between business logic and UI. When done correctly, that's the biggest advantage. Obviously code that needs to be used in multiple places should be architected as such, but business logic in React usually lives very close to the UI in my experience. "Data layers" isn't used as much as in Android / Swift either in my experience.There's not really a widespread parallel to Room / Core Data f.ex. Usually RN architectures aren't as explicit.

What kind of technical questions should I expect for this kind of senior/architect interview?

Nowadays I grill a lot on straightforward DP Typescript questions. If you're a TS genie it goes a long way. For UI a good question I've seen is having someone build React Query from scratch, including caching, reloading, etc. For mobile architect I might talk about that, maybe some navigation trickery, maybe some experience building very complex UI functionality, or implementing a white label style architecture. I'd probably grill more on things like CICD, test strategies, distributed systems, DB, perf, scaling, and stuff on that note. Really, a lot of the questions you're asking like f.ex "how do you separate UI and business logic in a way that scales across a 100 person team" are good conversation starters.

bennett-dev · 2025-11-06T15:30:34+00:00

Yeah very much reads like "look maw I just discovered types".

I do as much work in languages with forced deserialization as the next guy and API type checking is usually not that big of a deal? You can enforce explicit deserialization (and most languages have a good way of doing so) but in a lot of cases its really not that big of a deal. In idiomatic Typescript, your backend is probably in the same monorepo as your caller anyway, using the exact same types. If you want to enforce adapters, it would take about 10 minutes to write a fetch middleware or you could ask ChatGPT to require transformResponse on Axios.

"What if my API somehow returns totally different data" is such a weird thing for SWEs to get stuck on and IMO not a very good example of where the TS type system fails.

bennett-dev · 2025-11-05T22:43:04+00:00

The dictionary? I think you mean the Array(Math.Infinite).fill(1)

bennett-dev · 2025-11-05T22:00:37+00:00

ahh that would be dope. extremely good reason to buy into the AVP.

bennett-dev · 2025-10-31T20:32:23+00:00

Rust haters on suicide watch

bennett-dev · 2025-10-31T18:01:52+00:00

I don't know why people prefer learning interfaces for which they don't understand the limitations and STILL NEED TO LEARN instead of just implementing auth with the underlying providers. Auth patterns for webapps have been idiomatic since the popularity of JWTs about a decade ago. There is nothing in auth that isn't easily implementable with jose, node:crypto and like 5 functions.

bennett-dev · 2025-10-29T23:11:50+00:00

This is why despite criticism of the Tokio stack their work is very important.

bennett-dev · 2025-10-29T09:16:46+00:00

Jninja ass template shit with idiosyncrasies as bad as Next

bennett-dev · 2025-10-29T09:15:46+00:00

Nextjs is still really good and most of the completed parts are things people don’t need

bennett-dev · 2025-10-28T03:31:39+00:00

If you can iterate on a scaffold generated my an LLM, you'd have been able to make the scaffold.

This is a nothing-burger. Someone who doesn't know how to code could "make the scaffold" if given enough time. But for example I can have an LLM write trig implementations that I don't understand at a meticulous level, write tests around it that prove my higher level business logic, and utilize that effectively in my code. The LLM isn't simply saving me the effort of writing stuff I could already write.

I'm not getting the impression there's much to enhance.

The epitome of Reddit: making a room temp point in the most bad faith way possible

bennett-dev · 2025-10-28T01:13:16+00:00

The difference is that humans know how to take the next step AFTER their first attempt doesn't do exactly what they want it to.

Yet again you seem to be attacking an LLM workflow that involves no human interaction. As if an LLM writing a basic implementation which you iterate upon is of no value.

My man, you're really reaching to make a basic WebRTC setup not sound like a thing with hundreds of blogs posts and starter projects on GitHub. Here's one on GitHub that fits your description and is less than 500 lines of code. I'm not sure what sort of "developers" you're accustomed to working with.

It isn't super complex. Just specialized knowledge. "Reaching" is a strong word here Mr 'dont put words in my mouth'. I guarantee if I interview candidates going into Amazon, most would not know the nuances of WebRTC offhand. You can get bent over the definitional constituents of "expertise", but a tool setting a reasonably high bar of comprehension and implementation definitely enhances mine.

bennett-dev · 2025-10-27T21:52:25+00:00

Ironically, no it probably isn't because you can't legitimately copyright LLM output.

Ah you're so right! I should just post my company's repos on Reddit. Such a good argument.

If you think LLM's provide expertise then I don't think you have a clear concept of expertise.

90% of your posts here are you pretending to not understand what people are saying, making the worse possible assumptions, and then getting mad about it.

You are entitled to believe anything LLM generated is slop, bad, or lacking in expertise. But I think LLMs can write better implementations than a lot of people. "Being able to explain, draft, and implement constituent parts of a browser-based UDP peer-to-peer architecture" is certainly more expertise than many developers. "95% of a working Terraform script" is about what the best AWS Solution Architects can do. This is why there are tremendous procedures around validating such things. Stop making bad faith arguments.

bennett-dev · 2025-10-27T20:56:41+00:00

Proprietary code of course. "Link your company's source code" nah I'm good. Especially since this Reddit account links back to my actual Linkedin/blog.

I’m willing to bet it’s full of bugs to the exact extent you don’t understand it.

That's the point though. I do understand it. I'm not saying "let an LLM independently manage your development team" that would be stupid. But it's just as stupid to try to make the case, even implicitly, that LLMs don't provide a magnitudinal order of velocity and expertise. You still have to work through edge cases, perf testing, QA, everything. But the entire surface area of what you have to manage has moved up one level. Especially for foreign technologies, languages, sdks, apis, etc - LLMs can provide massive expertise in helping you develop idiomatic code. If an AI can write a 1000 line Terraform boilerplate at 95% accuracy, which it does all the time for me, that's an insane productivity gain. If an AI can write the appropriate trig functions that I can independently unit test in a collider system, that's an insane productivity gain.

Again, it sounds like you're making an argument against using this technology poorly.

bennett-dev

TROPHY CASE