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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

#321

Post by m00x »

hatefulheart wrote: post #318
onion2k wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strongly suspect that developers moving from writing code to managing agents to write code for them is very similar to developers moving into leadership and management roles and managing ICs to write code for them. Some devs just 'get it' and thrive, leading a team really well a…

Absurd. We are beset on all sides with companies declaring agentic coding a failure and here you are stating as a matter of fact some teams “thrive” with this probabilistic expensive approach to approximating working code? All the while concluding with “I have no evidence for any of this”.

Agentic coding is absolutely not a failure. It's just not the 10x that CEOs really wanted it to be.

We learned that some tasks don't really benefit from AI while others do. My team went from 7 people to 2 (went to new teams, no layoffs), and we're doing the same amount if not more work than we used to.

Is it more draining and lacking of focused work? Yes. Is it more money for the business? Yes.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#323

Post by rcarmo »

byzantinegene wrote: post #274
supern0va wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Nope. If you use pi and its extremely minimal harness you can see a _lot_ of difference in models.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#324

Post by Foobar8568 »

geraneum wrote: post #316
onion2k wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strongly suspect that developers moving from writing code to managing agents to write code for them is very similar to developers moving into leadership and management roles and managing ICs to write code for them. Some devs just 'get it' and thrive, leading a team really well a…

> If the team (or agent swarm) isn't performing well it often isn't a problem with them. It's a problem with the new manager still trying to stay on top of everything and micromanaging all the things. You see problems in the results? Simple, don’t check the results!

Let codex review Claude output and the contrary. Win for everyone involved, more code, more features, more token usage, promotions, code to be debug by juniors and the cycle of life can continue.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#325

Post by ifwinterco »

zamalek wrote: post #143
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…

> 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…

It can't follow orders because it isn't thinking - even in a best case scenario, all you're doing with AGENTS.md is altering the probability distribution of outcomes away from things you don't want towards things you do want.

However that still means there's always some probability it will do things you told it not to, it's just reduced

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#326

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

m00x wrote: post #321
hatefulheart wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absurd. We are beset on all sides with companies declaring agentic coding a failure and here you are stating as a matter of fact some teams “thrive” with this probabilistic expensive approach to approximating working code? All the while concluding with “I have no evidence for any of this”.

Agentic coding is absolutely not a failure. It's just not the 10x that CEOs really wanted it to be. We learned that some tasks don't really benefit from AI while others do. My team went from 7 people to 2 (went to new teams, no layoffs), and we're doing the same amount if not more work than we used to. Is it more draining and lacking of focused work? Yes. Is it more money for the business? Yes.

> while others do

Now we just need to find those tasks. I want to believe.

> and we're doing the same amount if not more work than we used to

Zero evidence for this. It's programmers self-reporting their own productivity. (Have we not learned this lesson after 50 years of programming practice?)

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#327

Post by hatefulheart »

m00x wrote: post #321
hatefulheart wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absurd. We are beset on all sides with companies declaring agentic coding a failure and here you are stating as a matter of fact some teams “thrive” with this probabilistic expensive approach to approximating working code? All the while concluding with “I have no evidence for any of this”.

Agentic coding is absolutely not a failure. It's just not the 10x that CEOs really wanted it to be. We learned that some tasks don't really benefit from AI while others do. My team went from 7 people to 2 (went to new teams, no layoffs), and we're doing the same amount if not more work than we used to. Is it more draining and lacking of focused work? Yes. Is it more money for the business? Yes.

Friend, you are commenting on a thread where one of the most prominent figures in tech (rightly or wrongly) is saying something did not meet expectations. As far as we can tell this is a man with every incentive to exaggerate and boost these products.

In my world, when something is expensive and doesn’t meet expectations it called a failure. Especially when something has been as hyped, scrutinized, defended and attacked as vibe coding.

Honestly, if you are the director of robotics at a firm I think it’s time you took a cold shower.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#328

Post by imtringued »

onion2k wrote: post #315
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…

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 strongly suspect that developers moving from writing code to managing agents to write code for them is very similar to developers moving into leadership and management roles and managing ICs to write code for them. Some devs just 'get it' and thrive, leading a team really well a…

Nothing you said makes any sense.

LLMs are driven by the text you enter into them and they are never fully autonomous unlike an actual employee.

You cannot train an AI and then at some point just let it loose.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#329

Post by Kevcmk »

SwellJoe wrote: post #319

Zuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.

I don't like Zuckerberg at all but Instagram and WhatsApp purchases were _very_ good calls

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#330

Post by pmg101 »

orphea wrote: post #181
mullingitover wrote: post #156

Having agents is like going from walking to having a bicycle. Business executives look at this and think "at this rate of progress we'll have self-driving cars in a few years!" and start making serious plans for that world. In reality I think we're going to be riding bikes for a long time. That situation of increased individual contributor productivity makes engineers more valuable , and increases the utility of engi…

Having agents is like going from walking to having a bicycle. To having roller skates at best . And even then - they are probably with hexagonal wheels.

Have you seen the original bicycles. Boneshakers and so on. No pneumatic tires. They were just enough more efficient than walking to sell but other than that pretty dreadful. Penny farthings where your feet directly drove the wheel. So many injuries!

Pretty good analogy I reckon.

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