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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

...What use is code if it doesn't build and run? What other way is there to build a browser that doesn't involved 'build and run'?

Writing junk in a text file isn't the hard part.

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Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort of iterative set-up where one component generates code, more or less "intelligently", and others check it against the C, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and what-have-you specs, and the whole thing iterates until all the checking components are happy. The components can’t be completely separate, of course, they’d have to be more or less intermingled or convergence would be very slow (like when lcamtuf had his fuzzer generate a JPEG out of an empty file), but isn’t that basically what (large) neural networks are; tangled messes of interconnected functions that do things in ways too complicated for anyone to bother figuring out?

How do you iteratively improve a broken codebase that doesn't compile with more than 3 million lines of code?

I don't want to defend the AI slop, but it's common for me to go on for a few weeks without being able to compile everything when doing something realy big. I can still compile individual modules and run their tests, but not the full application (which puts all modules together)... but it may take a lot of time until all modules can come together and actually run the app.

Human brains are big, tangled messes of interconnected neurons that do things in way too complicated to figure out.

That doesn't mean we can usefully build software that is a big, tangled mess.

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