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Comment by hyperbolablabla | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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