January 27, 2026
One bot, many feelings
One Human and One Agent = One Browser from Scratch
One coder + one AI build a baby browser—commenters feud over hype, 404s, and credit
TLDR: A single coder with one AI helper built a basic web browser in three days, impressing readers and poking the “more bots is better” myth. Comments split between fixing links, merging threads, and giving credit to earlier indie browser efforts—while debating what this means for small teams building big tools.
Tech drama alert: fed up with the hype around a “thousands of bots” browser project, a dev fired up one coding helper (an AI that writes code on command) and cranked out a tiny web browser in three days. That’s roughly 20,000 lines of code, no add‑on libraries, and it still displays web pages with text and images by leaning on built‑in system tools. One reviewer even ran the 1MB macOS app on their own blog and it rendered. The write‑up lives here: emsh.cat.
Key Points
- •A single Codex CLI agent produced ~20,000 lines of Rust over three days to build a basic web browser.
- •The browser renders HTML and CSS without any Rust crate dependencies.
- •System frameworks on Windows, macOS, and Linux are used for text and image rendering.
- •A 1MB macOS ARM64 binary was installed and successfully tested against simonwillison.net.
- •The author revises a prediction that a production-grade AI-assisted browser could be built by a small team by 2029.