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Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

reuters.com

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Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#221

Post by 8note »

paytonjjones wrote: post #205
darth_avocado wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. That is what I was trying to hint at. Yes, massive compute is needed to train ai, but it isn’t the only thing. A lot of research and experimentation goes into moving the marker just a little bit. Innovation can’t be forced into weekly sprints, it takes its own time.

Research and experimentation on neural nets has been going on since the 70s (arguably much earlier even), but the lions share of capability changes has all been in the last couple years. Scale was really the unlock; the new pre and post training techniques and architectures are very cool and useful but they definitely aren't the differentiators when comparing to the previous era of NLP.

which non-transformer neural networks are matching frontier performance using compute scale?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#222

Post by roughly »

tunesmith wrote: post #214
efficax wrote: post #115

I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened. Do I write all my code with an agent now? Yes. Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. I can produce more code than I used to…

I think it doesn't prove much that it hasn't happened yet. Companies might just be moving slower than you think, and are still planning on doing it. And, in many corners, "don't manually write code" is being joined by "don't manually read code" as an attractive principle.

> in many corners, "don't manually write code" is being joined by "don't manually read code" as an attractive principle.

I'm pretty sure I know where the failure case on that one is. The reason we're still manually reading code is to catch the failures and edge cases that the LLM fails to; not reading the code doesn't magically make the code good.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#223

Post by paxys »

segmondy wrote: post #11

The failure that is llama4 needs to be studied. Meta was kicking ass with llama3.x and then something happened, something really went wrong. what happened between that time and llama4? I think it happened after llama3.1, llama3.2 was nothing to write home about. We need the gossips, maybe a book

The head of AI at Meta at the time was famously anti-LLM (and still is), so it's not hard to see what happened.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#224

Post by kaydub »

efficax wrote: post #115

I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened. Do I write all my code with an agent now? Yes. Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. I can produce more code than I used to…

Companies are putting a ton of effort into getting to that point of having agents do the work unsupervised. Whoever gets there first is going to be the winner.

I personally don't think it's possible and I haven't written a line of code since Sept 2025.

There's an AI psychosis going on right now, especially among the execs or management class, and we all gotta nod our heads in agreement and burn through tokens.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#226

Post by cube00 »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #157
zamalek wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. Ignoring instructions - whether in AGENTS.md or my prompt - is the worst of it, and it routinely happens. It just waives things that I explicitly told it to do as part of the design. Vibe coders (in the true sense, zero oversight) claim that you just need to prompt it carefully. That's completely untrue when faced with your…

I’m convinced the magic bullet is deterministic checks. Linters, static analyzers, etc. Whatever you can do to create deterministic gates that the LLM simply must overcome to reach a “done” state, do it. Has been making a huge difference for my team, but sister teams are so invested in writing the perfect Make No Mistakes prompt that they just can’t see it. Basically I treat it like a junior dev. We don’t get junior…

> Whatever you can do to create deterministic gates that the LLM simply must overcome to reach a “done” state, do it.

First thing Gemini did when I tried that was turn off all the rules in eslint.config.mjs claiming they were "overly stylistic"

Yes, it got better once I explicitly told it not to disable any rules, so I accept I was holding it wrong but I do worry just how many footguns it puts into other things because I didn't know the right guardrails to give it.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#227

Post by eloisius »

kaydub wrote: post #224
efficax wrote: post #115

I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened. Do I write all my code with an agent now? Yes. Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. I can produce more code than I used to…

Companies are putting a ton of effort into getting to that point of having agents do the work unsupervised. Whoever gets there first is going to be the winner. I personally don't think it's possible and I haven't written a line of code since Sept 2025. There's an AI psychosis going on right now, especially among the execs or management class, and we all gotta nod our heads in agreement and burn through tokens.

If you have runway, it’s a good time to start your own thing or join someone who is. Personally, I cannot force myself to wade through slop PRs from careless coworkers. If that’s the job now, I’d rather run a hotdog stand or something.

Luckily, I don’t think things are that dire. I think the companies issuing AI mandates are manufacturing sawdust, and even if it works, it would just enable them to burn through customer goodwill in record time as they make user-hostile decisions free from engineer pushback.

These are going to be a few tough years, but I think the opportunities to start something new are everywhere.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#229

Post by _pdp_ »

kaydub wrote: post #224
efficax wrote: post #115

I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened. Do I write all my code with an agent now? Yes. Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. I can produce more code than I used to…

Companies are putting a ton of effort into getting to that point of having agents do the work unsupervised. Whoever gets there first is going to be the winner. I personally don't think it's possible and I haven't written a line of code since Sept 2025. There's an AI psychosis going on right now, especially among the execs or management class, and we all gotta nod our heads in agreement and burn through tokens.

Agents already run unsupervised, and they can code unsupervised too. The real question is what worthwhile work we should point these capabilities at. Nobody has really cracked that yet.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#230

Post by CodingJeebus »

kaydub wrote: post #224
efficax wrote: post #115

I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened. Do I write all my code with an agent now? Yes. Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. I can produce more code than I used to…

Companies are putting a ton of effort into getting to that point of having agents do the work unsupervised. Whoever gets there first is going to be the winner. I personally don't think it's possible and I haven't written a line of code since Sept 2025. There's an AI psychosis going on right now, especially among the execs or management class, and we all gotta nod our heads in agreement and burn through tokens.

I don't think it's possible either. DHH pointed out in the most recent episode of Rework that AI removes a lot of the barriers to shipping code, therefore making it possible to build in lots of different directions in ways that was prohibitive to many organizations in the past. But this isn't necessarily a good thing, companies still need to understand what to build in order to ship a cohesive product. AI is great for prototyping and refining use cases in ways that are far superior to static figma designs, etc., but it is not a replacement for taste and execution.

But a slop machine that haphazardly shoots features against the wall to see what sticks still isn't a winning product strategy in 2026. And the problem I see increasingly is that so much energy is being focused on how to deliver with AI internally and externally that is not being expended to advance a company's product. I believe more and more in the idea that for many startups and companies, the actual "customers" are the investors and the product-market fit that companies seek is the product of the company itself, because this is all being driven from the top down, not by customers and users in the market asking for AI features.

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