I recognize the feeling of handholding and have the tingles telling me that given the step change of Opus 5.5 and what passed by in the news lately, agent swarms are about to become mainstream. That's exactly what a project like this would use. I think everybody will be able to create their own engine and out of the ones who try, a few will actually make gains beyond what's available in parts of the engine.

It's a matter of "bring the best non-conflicting wins together" at that point. The existing engines are too big to flip over their codebase without having seen competitors prove it too.

My estimate is that with the release of Opus 5.7, companies need to have their shit together because the work ecosystem will flip over at 6 at the current rate of progress. This generation is the first one that delivers local applications with a better toolset than a small scale SaaS in hours to days.

I guess my hope is that while this may be the case now, perhaps it won’t be eventually. If you can generate from a spec, different implementations may be slower or worse in a variety of ways but still meet the spec.

At that point it’s about optimizing and deciding trade offs, both of which might mean heavily directing the generation in some way. Over time, maybe LLMs or whatever succeeds them won’t go down so many bad architectural paths. We’ve certainly seen that already in the last year or two.

I also don’t think folks like you ever lose your value in these efforts, even if all of it came true tomorrow. At worst it would be you plus the AI, which would always be a more potent combination than say, me with an AI trying to make a browser engine.

> far too slow to be useful

Speed is probably not part of a web spec.

> wrong architecturally

Nor is software architecture (though web security specs may have some influence here).

That does happen, but these days they tend to add that kind of thing to the spec (and the test suite). There was a minor drama several years when WHATWG (representing browser vendors) effectively took over the spec process from the W3C because they were fed up with the W3C taking an idealistic viewpoint, and speccing things that they couldn't actually implement.

Maybe some day this will be the basis but not the complete solution. Agreed that there’s a lot of semi intangible art that goes into browser engine decisions. I’m guessing a lot of which have to do as much with people and current landscape dynamics as they do with the tech.

Maybe over time the specs will become more machine readable (bounded and concrete) if we take these paths. Although in some sense everything is machine readable these days, just not deterministically so (less helpful for specs, but not nothing either).

Your second point makes a lot of sense to me too. I’m not sure how this could handle that facet of human nature, except possibly to indirectly contribute to speeding up the cycle of spec creation.

Slander! What about the (occasional) maracas?

that looks very interesting. if it's targeting the electron/sciter market I would encourage you to put the binary size and memory footprint in the readme so people can see where it lies on that spectrum - it's one of my top priorities when evaluating a desktop app library.