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embedding-shapes
Personal blog · emsh.cat · on HN as embedding-shapedesignaiculture
embedding-shapes is a personal blog at emsh.cat about design, ai and culture. Since 2026, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Show HN: One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOC”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-25, and you can follow it by feed.
31mentions?
9HN people?
2026–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link emsh.cat for the 'One Human, One Agent, One Browser' experiment of building a browser from scratch with one AI agent, and for posts such as 'Good Taste'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOC5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2026-01-27
- Good Taste3 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2026-01-25
- Why a room full of strangers can feel more human than anything on a screen2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-08-25
- /en/good-taste/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-15
What Hacker News says?
Thanks a bunch! I actually tried "writing more personal" just some weeks ago, and the feedback I received so far been relatively OK I think, except some people apparently think the part about the drugs to be childish. May I ask what you think of it, if it does sound like it's written with actual personality? https://emsh.cat/en/the-people-are-still-there/ I won't claim to be a professional author or even good, but l…
Comment linking /en/the-people-are-still-there/
on “Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)”Submitted How to Disable Firefox's New Emoji Picker as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOk, that makes sense. "Likely, based on heuristics" is sufficient to inform your opinions and decisions about Cloudflare. I was hoping you might have something more concrete, but appreciate the thoughtful reply. Tangent: I found your blog in your profile and liked your post on "Good Taste"^1 1. https://emsh.cat/en/good-taste/
Comment linking /en/good-taste/
on “I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe”Submitted People Are Still There as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy. Why is it easy to copy? I too have written a tiny essay on this topic ( https://emsh.cat/good-taste/ ) but I don't see how "taste" is easy to copy, at least I haven't been convinced by any of the arguments people chucked at me so far.
Comment linking /good-taste/
on “No Skill. No Taste”Submitted Why a room full of strangers can feel more human than anything on a screen as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNever went to a Phish show, but now you got my interest up :) I'm mostly coming from the electronic music scene, in various capacities, and pretty much the same feeling and senses exposed in those, even in more "artificial" music styles. I feel like a lot of the "AI-doomerism" could be solved if people go out where large groups listen to music, and dance together with strangers. I even wrote about one recent experie…
Comment linking /en/the-people-are-still-there/
on “The Nature of Dance”Submitted The People Are Still There as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> For anything that requires taste and judgment, we've still got a long way to go. There are lots of great demos out there but few if any real examples of vibe coded (or whatever you want to call it) software standing alone as an alternative to project people wrote Yeah, we still have exactly the same problem as before LLMs/agents, namely that we lack people with "Good Taste". I've outlined how I feel about before (…
Comment linking /good-taste/
on “From specification to stress test: a weekend with Claude”Submitted Show HN: A HTML Quine Made with Nix as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSeems to be a frequently occurring issue, most (good) software engineers know that LOC basically means nothing, if anything, less LOC is a better goal over more LOC, if you absolutely have to have a goal. As soon as people/companies starts bragging about how many LOC they can ship, you need to start being very suspicious, mostly because they just admitted to not actually understand software engineering at all. Curso…
Comment linking /en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC/day AI code. A developer looked under the hood”Submitted I dont want AI that replace my taste, I want AI that help me use my taste better as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Yes, this is what Ai assisted coding is good at. This is where I wish we spent more energy, figuring out better ways to work with the AI, rather than trying replace some parts wholesale with AI. Wrote a bunch more specifically about that, while I was watching the agent work on the browser itself, here: https://emsh.cat/good-taste/ (it's like a companion-piece I guess)
Comment linking /good-taste/
on “Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't”Submitted Good Taste as a Super Power as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I also haven’t looked at this particular case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to be the same thing here. Be surprised then, because me, who left the critique, probably exclusively programmed with agents for the last year or so, so unlikely I think the code is bad because I "don't like AI". I don't love it either, but wouldn't call myself a AI-hater by any measurements, would be weird to write articles like this if so…
Comment linking /en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “The last six months in LLMs in five minutes”Submitted Show HN: One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOC as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think framing it as a site for people that are positive about AI is probably the wrong way to go, but around it kf you don't want just a bunch of AI psychosis posts and nothing else. I think it would be better if, instead of being defined in terms of being "positive" about AI (in the sense of saying that everything to do with AI is all great and rosy and awesome, and thinking every new AI thing is the next big thi…
Comment linking /one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “Hacker News Alternative Where People Are Positive About AI”Submitted Good Taste as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf you search Google Trends for enshittification, half the results contain Doctorow as well [0]. Normal people have no idea who that is. And that's just Google, which everyone on HN hates to the point of vibrating angrily because there isn't an obvious part of the name to replace derogatorily with a dollar sign. Nobody uses this term outside of Hacker News, and even on HN it's code for "this site doesn't work when I…
Comment linking /good-taste/
on “ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files”You've read many of them? Then you'd be the best to review even more of them! I'm ready for a raw and truthful review of my very own edition of the "taste" blog post, posted mere ~6 months ago, on the same topic: https://emsh.cat/en/good-taste/
Comment linking /en/good-taste/
on “Taste Is All That's Left”Engineers are running 8 instances of Claude Code at once. That doesn't mean they are completing work 8x faster. If you must hold the context for 8 agents in your head at once, your expertise as an engineer is wasted. See https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - One man + one agent in 72 hours, did better than thousands of agents over weeks. Staying focused on one or two important tasks still works. You wo…
Comment linking /one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “Every minute you aren't running 69 agents, you are falling behind”I think you don't get it :) I've written more about how I see it being here: https://emsh.cat/good-taste/ To repeat, I'm not worried. Making music might be easier than before, but having "Good Taste" isn't easier than before, it's still hard. And good stuff isn't just produced and made, they have decisions and choices behind them, and make the wrong ones, your thing ends up sucking. If you just care about average co…
Comment linking /good-taste/
on “Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?”Indian high school senior here about to start CS in college here. Your project feels phenomenal. Definitely starred. I was actually trying to create a browser (in golang) myself as well (using LLM assistance) & I really couldn't do it after countless efforts. https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/golang-browser Much of it was just curiosity towards if LLM's could port the rust project by emsh https://emsh.cat/one-hum…
Comment linking /one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “Show HN: I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++”This should be a link to https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - ideally merged with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522
Comment linking /one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “One Human and One Agent = One Browser from Scratch”As a fun exercise, I tried to see how close I could get to Cursor's results without using any Rust crates, and by making the agent actually care about the code. End results: 20K LOC for a browser that more or less works the same, on three platforms, leveraging commonly available system libraries and no 3rd party Rust crates: https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467…
Comment linking /one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype”Heh, inspired by hiccup, I ended up implementing my favorite Clojure templating library but in Nix, exactly for the purpose of static site generation :) Even have a nifty demo of how it looks for that, it basically looks/works the same as hiccup: https://emsh.cat/niccup/examples/blog/
Comment linking /niccup/examples/blog/
on “My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month”What do you mean? Are you suggesting that the "one human" means it wasn't entirely written by AI? That's not the case, the "one human" there is the one human prompting it: https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ If your goalpost here is "no human involved at all" then it's a good thing I asked you what your goalposts were before spending any time on this! UPDATE: OK I think I see what's happened here! You'…
Comment linking /one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “The Five Levels: From Spicy Autocomplete to the Software Factory”I think what I wanted to demonstrate here was less "You can build a browser with an agent", and more how bullshit Cursor's initial claim was, that "hundreds of agents" somehow managed to build something good, autonomously. It's more of a continuation of a blog post I wrote some days ago ( https://emsh.cat/cursor-implied-success-without-evidence/ ), than a standalone proof of "agents can build browsers". Unfortunatel…
Comment linking /cursor-implied-success-without-evidence/
on “Show HN: One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOC”> The blog post itself is one of the first that describes a large scale experiment of agents, what works, what doesn't. There is very little hype. They didn't say it's game changing or Cursor is the best AI tool. Three days later, and I took it upon myself to replicate their experiment, except just me + one more agent, here is the results: https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ In short, I think Cursor ma…
Comment linking /one-human-one-agent-one-browser/
on “Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by parallel agents”Knowing you browse HN quite a lot (not that I'm not guilty of that too), that's some high praise! Thank you :) I think the focus with LLM-assisted coding for me has been just that, assisted coding, not trying to replace whole people. It's still me and my ideas driving (and my "Good Taste", explained here: https://emsh.cat/good-taste/ ), the LLM do all the things I find more boring. > prove that no reference implemen…
Comment linking /good-taste/
on “Show HN: One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch in 20K LOC”
