AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won’t say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: “We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor.”
He followed up with: “It’s 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.”
That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? He also added: “It kind of works,” which is not the most ringing endorsement…
…this week‑long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20 trillion tokens and would have cost several million dollars at then‑current list prices for frontier models.
Even if you’re into AI coding, I never understood the hype around cursor. In the beginning, they were just 3 months ahead of alternatives. Today you can’t even say that anymore and they’re still “worth” billions. You can get a similar prediction quality from other editors if you know how to use them, paying a fraction of the price.
Cursor also chugs on tokens like a 1978 Lincoln Continental, that’s how they get marginally better results, so bringing your API is not even a viable option. The first time I tried it, I asked a simple 1-line edit on a markdown and it sent out 20k tokens before I could say “AGI is 6 months away” and still got the change wrong.
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Even if you’re into AI coding, I never understood the hype around cursor. In the beginning, they were just 3 months ahead of alternatives. Today you can’t even say that anymore and they’re still “worth” billions. You can get a similar prediction quality from other editors if you know how to use them, paying a fraction of the price.
Cursor also chugs on tokens like a 1978 Lincoln Continental, that’s how they get marginally better results, so bringing your API is not even a viable option. The first time I tried it, I asked a simple 1-line edit on a markdown and it sent out 20k tokens before I could say “AGI is 6 months away” and still got the change wrong.