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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

#271

Post by Davidzheng »

mikgp wrote: post #202
Jyaif wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knows if we are going to "just" be riding bikes for a long time. To give time for society to adapt I hope it's the case, but we really have no idea.

Right, but if your real assertion is “we have no idea”, it seems you should point your skepticism significantly more towards the people betting $100 billion dollars that self-driving cars are coming next year than the ones who aren’t.

Evidence towards aside, the risk calculation depends on how much upside is from the 100B if progress starts the same rate. I think it's hard to bound that accurately

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#272

Post by zdragnar »

paytonjjones wrote: post #133
darth_avocado wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that, I think people overestimate how much AI will progress as you throw more compute at it. It’s the “9 women can’t deliver a baby in a month” equivalent of AI. Additional compute won’t magically give you AGI.

Maybe not AGI, but if you look at the differences between, say, GPT-2 and GPT 5.5, it's remarkable how well it works to mostly just throw scale at the problem.

I was under the impression that the deltas between versions were shrinking- i.e. gpt 4 -> 5 was much less impactful than 3 -> 4 or 2 -> 3. If the growth is getting diminishing returns, I can't say I'm optimistic without finding a drastically different approach.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#273

Post by w29UiIm2Xz »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #230
kaydub wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

The bottleneck wasn't the coding, but previously it had the second order effect of slowing product development decisions enough to improve product cohesion.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#274

Post by byzantinegene »

supern0va wrote: post #148
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 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. I find this somewhat puzzling. I thought things were moving quickly, but at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that…

coding harnesses improvements mattered more than llm improvements this past year. You could solve problems on claude sonnet on claude code that you couldn't solve a year prior.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#275

Post by zmgsabst »

cuttothechase wrote: post #250
rogerrogerr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It will burn up the tokens to get through the deterministic gates, more so when n order dependencies are involved in the mix. Enough typewritters and monkeys could get it done too.

I found I used fewer tokens by having many short prompts than long ones — because it spent many fewer tokens thinking and narrating.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#276

Post by majormajor »

w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #273
CodingJeebus wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

The bottleneck wasn't the coding, but previously it had the second order effect of slowing product development decisions enough to improve product cohesion.

It also created a cargo cult though.

"What can we get rid of for MVP" as a design strategy vs a way to iterate fast, for instance. Cutting things isn't a way to product cohesion, especially if you never go back to do the full-featured version.

Sometimes I wonder how many features or products flopped because the MVP dropped the things that would've actually taken off, and the business "smartly" pivoted away.

There's still a limit to how many new features you could shove in front of your users per month. But what if they were all much more baked out of the gate?

(See also: "data driven" product management as an excuse to not have your own vision for the product. If three competitors build a lot more in the span of six months, but have to depend more on their own skills and instincts vs A/Bing every little detail, maybe more of them will ship more bold and interesting new things.)

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#277

Post by theturtletalks »

mgh95 wrote: post #266
theturtletalks wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we have provided custom storefronts for people running the SaaS on-prem and we have a handful of people using our cloud hosting. This is all without any marketing efforts and word of mouth. Albeit, we launched the Shopify alternative in Dec 2025 and the Toast alternative in May 2026. The gym and grocery ones in the works. My main goal is to first get all of these open-source alternatives to start building themsel…

Interesting. Where is this product located? If I'm looking at your profile correctly, this appears to be Openship[1], which is just a collection of starter templates from something from Nextjs and something called Keystone for each vertical. Is this what it is you are talking about? I'm very curious how much revenue this is generating. [1] https://github.com/openshiporg

Yes, it’s built on the shoulders of giants, Next.js[0] and lesser-known Keystone.js[1].

Next is a full stack framework and Keystone is a CMS built on top of Prisma and GraphQL. Keystone was created by this Australian company called Thinkmill. They have used it to help businesses build custom backend systems for more than a decade. But it needed to be deployed separately from Next and they were using emotion css for their dashboard and I wanted to use Tailwind/Shadcn. So first, I had to make the Next Keystone Starter that brought in Keystone into Next so each SaaS is just 1 Next app with a built-in storefront, GraphQL API, and dashboard.

Once that was built (and it took a while tbh), I started to build the Shopify and Toast alternative. But the itch to get these built quickly and autonomously had me working on the harness in the past months and now that is nearly complete.

Here is the e-commerce[2] and restaurant[3] repos. They have a link to deployed demos you can check out as well.

As far as revenue, I don’t feel comfortable relaying that right now. We have other revenue streams like fractional CTO where companies give us equity to manage all their tech and that is quite hard to quantify. Before Openfronts being built, I built Openship, and e-commerce OMS and that has exceeded 5M orders processed since its inception in 2019. That’s not counting orders by businesses running it on-prem.

I actually posted about this vision on HN[4] when I launched Openship and the response is what kept me building.

0. https://nextjs.org

1. https://keystonejs.com

2. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront

3. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront-restaurant

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#278

Post by byzantinegene »

mgh95 wrote: post #266
theturtletalks wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we have provided custom storefronts for people running the SaaS on-prem and we have a handful of people using our cloud hosting. This is all without any marketing efforts and word of mouth. Albeit, we launched the Shopify alternative in Dec 2025 and the Toast alternative in May 2026. The gym and grocery ones in the works. My main goal is to first get all of these open-source alternatives to start building themsel…

Interesting. Where is this product located? If I'm looking at your profile correctly, this appears to be Openship[1], which is just a collection of starter templates from something from Nextjs and something called Keystone for each vertical. Is this what it is you are talking about? I'm very curious how much revenue this is generating. [1] https://github.com/openshiporg

very much seems like a product built by an someone with no product research. The UX makes no sense for e-commerce.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#279

Post by threethirtytwo »

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…

Im not worried about anything within 1 or 2 years. The upheaval if it happens will likely be within 10.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#280

Post by byzantinegene »

majormajor wrote: post #276
w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottleneck wasn't the coding, but previously it had the second order effect of slowing product development decisions enough to improve product cohesion.

It also created a cargo cult though. "What can we get rid of for MVP" as a design strategy vs a way to iterate fast, for instance. Cutting things isn't a way to product cohesion, especially if you never go back to do the full-featured version. Sometimes I wonder how many features or products flopped because the MVP dropped the things that would've actually taken off, and the business "smartly" pivoted away. There's s…

the opposite can also be true, feature bloat can destroy products by making it unclear for users what they should expect.
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