January 14, 2026
Million lines, zero chill
Scaling long-running autonomous coding
AI coding swarm writes a million lines; devs cry “Cool… but does it work”
TLDR: AI bots ran for weeks with planner–worker–judge roles, claiming a million-line browser and big code migrations. Commenters are split: some say this proves the future, others demand merged pull requests and expert reviews to prove the code actually works and isn’t just impressive noise.
An AI team says they set loose a swarm of coding bots for weeks, split into “planner” bosses, relentless “worker” bees, and a final “judge” to keep them honest—and the internet promptly split into cheers and side-eye. They claim the bots hammered out a web browser in under a week (over 1 million lines!), ran hundreds of agents at once, then spent three weeks migrating their own app from one framework to another, and even sped up video rendering 25x with a Rust rewrite. Ambitious? Absolutely. Controversial? Oh yes.
The hottest reactions: skeptics are yelling merge the PR or it didn’t happen, with trjordan demanding proof that the huge migration actually ships. jphoward is baffled by the “manager bot” idea—how do you glue all the pieces together without reading them? Meanwhile, simonw says he literally predicted this exact moment by 2029 and now it’s arriving early, citing his predictions. sashank_1509 wants a browser expert to sanity-check the code—“Ladybird or Servo-level?”—while ZitchDog flexes that he’s used similar planner/delegate tricks to build a supersonic validator and argues standards + test suites are the secret sauce.
Memes rolled in fast: “Screenshot-driven development,” “AI interns forgetting to unlock files,” and “Swarms that ship… eventually.” Hype meets receipts, and the receipts are what everyone wants.
Key Points
- •Initial flat, self-coordinating agent design with locks led to contention, brittleness, and reduced throughput.
- •Optimistic concurrency control improved robustness but flat hierarchy caused risk-averse behavior and churn.
- •Introducing planner, worker, and judge roles enabled scalable coordination and reduced tunnel vision.
- •The system built a web browser in about a week, producing over 1M lines across 1,000 files with minimal conflicts.
- •Agents performed a 3+ week Solid-to-React migration in the Cursor codebase and achieved a 25x video rendering speedup using Rust.