January 16, 2026
Compile Me Maybe
Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence
A million lines and a screenshot — but nobody can make it run
TLDR: Cursor teased an AI-built browser with over a million lines of code, but the repo doesn’t compile and there’s no demo. Commenters tested 100 commits, found all failing, and blasted the hype while demanding a tagged, runnable version — turning a glossy experiment into a call for proof.
Cursor dropped a glossy blog about “agents coding for weeks” to build a browser, boasting 1 million lines across 1,000 files and dreamy claims like “hundreds of workers” happily pushing code. The catch? The community dove into the repo and found… a whole lot of red. People trying to build it hit dozens of errors, GitHub Actions shows repeated failures, and there’s even a fresh issue thread calling it out. The blog’s careful language never says the browser actually works, but the screenshot-and-vibes presentation sure feels like it does. Cue the drama.
Commenters went full CSI: embedding-shape ran “cargo check” (a simple build sanity test) across the last 100 commits and reported every single one failed. josefritzishere zeroed in on the line: “They never claim it’s working,” calling this the classic AI hype move. Meanwhile, paulus_magnus2 pointed to Twitter, where the CEO reportedly said, “We built a browser with GPT-5.2,” stoking the hype machine beyond the more cautious blog. Others asked who this was meant to impress; pros want a clear how-to-run and a known-good tag. Jokes flew: “cargo check is the new lie detector,” “AI wrote a million lines but forgot the plot.” A few defend it as research, but the crowd’s verdict is loud: give us a reproducible demo or stop implying victory. The open issue? Still open. The browser? Still not compiling.
Key Points
- •Cursor’s Jan 14, 2026 blog describes autonomous coding agents running for weeks to explore scaling agentic coding.
- •As a test, Cursor aimed to build a browser from scratch; agents ran nearly a week and produced over 1M lines across 1,000 files, linking the GitHub repo fastrender.
- •Cursor claims agents can understand the large codebase and hundreds of workers can push concurrently with minimal conflicts.
- •The article reports the fastrender repository does not compile, CI runs fail, PRs were merged with failing CI, and no known-good revision or demo is provided.
- •An open GitHub issue (#98) tracks compilation problems, and checks of recent commits found none that compile cleanly.