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samuell

This is such an important project, to keep the big corporations from completely controlling the future of the web.

And it doesn't hurt that Andreas seems to be such a nice, humble guy.

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> Andreas seems to be such a nice, humble guy.

Truer words have never been spoken!

His monthly update videos are so soothing to watch.

In order for that to be true Ladybird would need a sizeable market share, more than browsers like Firefox, which also isn't made by a corporation.

Interesting whether guys employ LLM to speed up development. Starting a new browser just like this would be very bold decision like 15 years ago, now seems like a reasonable thing to do actually.

Most of the guys in the LB project don't use LLM's, even though it extremely spec-driven, because C++ is not great with AI for some reason.

But Andreas does fairly heavily, if you watch his code VODs you see that he leans on copilot often.

With some "Thank you, Copilot"-s sprinkled in to spare him in the robot uprising universe.

I haven't watched the VODs myself but I am curious as to the nature of the Copilot use - is it a fancy autocomplete, a 2nd look at code he's already written, or is it generating large parts of the code?

The SerenityOS project literally has "NIH syndrome" at its core ["the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch.", https://ladybird.org/#faq] so I would expect a degree of skepticism of AI code generation.

But there was the post semi-recently about Cloudflare developers shipping a mostly-AI-generated software, overseen by real devs [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166] Perhaps Andreas' use of Copilot is a similar thing, where he saves keystrokes and finds errors in the generated output with his own experience. I'll go watch some VODs.

Most of it was written without LLMs for that reason, but now Ladybird is its own project, the NIH focus has largely gone away. They are using a lot of third party code now. Their mission is compete with Chrome, not be 100% NIH.

With "No code from other browsers" which in a browser must mean most of the code is largely written from scratch?

The original project did everything from scratch. Video/audio decoding, SSL, font rendering, etc. a huge portion of the code.

They're still not using existing browser code because being an independent implementation of the web standards is a key goal. They've found bugs in the standard just by implementing it.

Would have to be at the hands of an already skilled practitioner. Average Joe programmer setting out to build a browser with Copilot will end badly. Big-picture architecture and discipline is too important with this level of complexity.

Not what I meant really. antirez is not a junior yet codes with LLM assistence.

Not sure why this gets downvoted but since when is it illegal to ask whether people actually use intellisense? I mean - what’s wrong with being interests how ppl bootstrap and get to thousands of LOCs in practically no time.

Just for the record - I never said vibecoded.

A comment that could apply to anything. Notice how nobody except for your subthread here is talking about AI. This thread is not about AI or LLMs, for a good reason.

they’re downvoting you, but the developer actually uses copilot a lot in his development videos. why are people so up in arms?

of course, he’s a very, very proficient developer and a browser specialist. he’s not just vibecoding, like you might be implying. but he also uses llms for development.

Because LLMs being a thing now has no bearing on whether it's a good idea or more practical to build a new browser.

Because it's bad enough (for those of us that aren't heavily invested in the topic) that often 50%+ of the frontpage is about AI now, to go into the comments for a clearly non-AI topic and see a bunch of "but what about LLMs" comments really just sucks the fun out of HN for a lot of us.

That’s not even close to true unless you rate all ML as AI and all conditional structures thinking. Like, why don’t you first try to rate and count them before spitting malice ?

in all honestly much less AI stuff gets to the HN front compared to when OpenAI first released GPTs. Given there are thousands of publications every month and dozens of startups launched with ridiculous valuations and most of this is actually submitted here for karma or leverage.

Besides, what, knowledge representation via stochastic probabilistic graphical models is now an heresy? Since when? Since MPEG or MP3 ?

Well to my surprise they do, even though every sane dev in 2025 uses some sort of code assîtes autocomplete. So it seams now we discussing what is the threshold reg intelligence of the autocomplete.

Ridiculous stuff indeed.

I’ve been coding for 25 years and nothing in my message implies vibe coding. I know what I’m talking and sure bet many others here do.

Ladybird is 425k LOC. Chromium is 3.5m LOC.

Starting a new browser, using LLMs... Is not going to maintain enough context.

Whilst Andreas does use Copilot a fair bit [0], he tends to do a line at a time, frequently disagree and rewrites his own, before prompting again. That is... He basically uses it as a fancy autocomplete. Not much else.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8&t=3099s

I believe Chromium is closer to 35m LOC

Fancy or not an autocomplete is autocomplete. What if it autocompletes one class or one function at a time? Does this make it obnoxious to even think asking about it on HN?

We've had macro expansion since the 80s. If your IDE can't autocomplete, then it's a text editor and not an IDE. Which makes it an irrelevant question to ask, because it has no impact on making something feasible or not.

Of course, brother, that’s the point. And while oldies one by one get to pair their IDEs with RAG+LLM autocompletes, some brothers keep raging against people using higher level code assistance.

Which is both ridiculous and also very agressive.

I'm not raging... But again... It's not relevant, here.

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