January 27, 2026
Hold my Rust—HN melts down
Show HN: One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOC
Built in 3 days with no add‑ons—HN splits between awe and “Ladybird already did it”
TLDR: A developer and an AI agent built a simple, cross‑platform browser in about three days with 20K lines of code, and Hacker News exploded. Fans praised its small size and readable approach, skeptics pointed to Ladybird as the real bar, and everyone wants to see the prompts that made it work
Hacker News is buzzing after a lone dev + an AI sidekick whipped up a bare‑bones web browser in about 72 hours, with no third‑party add‑ons and roughly 20,000 lines of code. The demo’s cheeky—“it’s a browser encoded as pixels in a video!”—but the community heat is real.
The hype camp is loud: commenters cheered the tiny size and clean code, with one calling it a “notably better” showcase than a rival project that ballooned to 1.6 million lines. Minimal dependencies and cross‑platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux) had folks swooning. Others admired the process over the product—tight constraints, readable code, and a steady build that always compiled felt like a masterclass.
Then came the spice. Curious minds begged for the secret sauce: the prompts! How do you get an AI agent to actually ship? Meanwhile, the skeptics went full reality check: predictions about AI‑built “real browsers” by 2029 sparked a clapback—“that’s already Ladybird,” the open‑source upstart. Cue debate over whether this is a glimpse of the future or just a flashy proof‑of‑concept.
Jokes flew about “no JavaScript” being the killer feature, and people loved the petty details: headless tests so windows don’t photobomb your desktop, and yes, it scrolls—because it’s a browser, obviously. The verdict? Equal parts wow, teachable moment, and “HN never forgets” energy
Key Points
- •A basic browser was built in Rust in ~3 days (~70 hours) with ~20K lines of code.
- •The project enforced no third-party Rust dependencies, relying only on OS-provided libraries.
- •The browser renders HTML and CSS (no JavaScript), and supports Linux (X11), macOS, and Windows.
- •Development included screenshot-based regression/E2E tests, a headless mode, and features like scrolling and a back button.
- •CI was configured for all three platforms, tests passed, and a release was produced within the time constraint.