3 weeks ago
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If a team of human engineers built a web browser that only half-worked, it wouldn’t get people talking. But when Michael Truell, CEO of coding startup Cursor, posted on X last week that a swarm of AI agents had built a browser that, he wrote, “kind of works”—while running uninterrupted for a week without any human intervention—it went viral across the tech world, with over 6 million views.
Why the buzz? Two big reasons: For one thing, AI’s attention span has historically been short. In the early days of ChatGPT, models could stay on task for only a few seconds. That horizon stretched to minutes for better models, then to hours. The Cursor project claims to be one of the first times an AI system has sustained a complex, open-ended software project for an entire week without human guidance.
In addition, single AI agents are limited to focused, small tasks. But getting hundreds of agents to coordinate on a big project has still seemed futuristic. That’s why Cursor wanted to see how far they could push autonomous coding—on a project that could take months for a human team—by having an “orchestra” of AI agents working as a team. Could an AI system be persistent enough, and work together well enough, to explore code, break work into parts, debug itself, and keep moving forward for days without drifting away from the task at hand?
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