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Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch.

Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.

It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.

I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).

[1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/boomkat

> from scratch

Beg to differ.

I understand the feeling - LLMs have seen the source code for other projects. but would you not have read other engine’s code to understand the problem space and existing solutions too?

The architecture is different, the language is different, implementation choices are all mine. It was not developed by autonomous agents. I don’t think you’ll find any code that is a duplicate of other engines* - happy to be proven wrong here.

* The regexp and unicode modules are taken from QuickJS and have the appropriate licenses.

Exactly. A common LLM criticism is that they "steal copyrighted code" (or other IP), but then often the same people say that code or music should not be patentable because it's all the same basic patterns just combined in different ways, so nobody should have a monopoly on that.
This is easily one of the most egregious examples of the "same people" fallacy I've seen on HN.
Please explain what you mean by that.
whichever LLM GP is using, there's undoubtedly mutliple JS engines' source code in the training data, making it not really "from scratch".