Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected • Hacker News Board

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#331

Post by ifwinterco » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:31 AM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #283

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. Amara’s law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. This continues to be applied to AI where people…

I believe this in general but the issue with AI specifically is historically in every cycle we've overestimated the potential of AI in both the short and the long run - people in the 60s were genuinely quite convinced we were close to AGI for a few years, as ridiculous as that now sounds.

This is why you get "AI winters" but we've never had a "steam engine winter" or a "railway winter" or a "petrochemicals winter"

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#332

Post by Foobar8568 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

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…

People will need to realize that these behavior are actually truly human in nature.

People thought they'd get their own persona through AI, they get a sum of the best and worse of everyone.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#333

Post by edu » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:34 AM UTC

Kevcmk wrote: post #329

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

Indeed they were.

Also, it’s interesting to note that in both cases they where two very lean companies (Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55) with pretty a pretty large and engaged user base (30 million for Insta and 450 million for WhatsApp)

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#334

Post by silisili » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

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.

There was no luck involved, just stealing and legal swindling.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#335

Post by eloisant » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

Kevcmk wrote: post #329

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

They spied on their mobile users with the Facebook app to detect Instagram and WhatsApp growth early

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#336

Post by mattoxic » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:40 AM UTC

edu wrote: post #333

Kevcmk wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed they were. Also, it’s interesting to note that in both cases they where two very lean companies (Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55) with pretty a pretty large and engaged user base (30 million for Insta and 450 million for WhatsApp)

Yeah, and he threw a huge bunch of cash to acquire them. pretty easy to acquire. Harder to build. He got lucky with facebook because myspace sucked. Good timing.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#337

Post by kombine » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:43 AM UTC

Kevcmk wrote: post #329

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

As another commenter said that he acquired both with the money made on Facebook, they didn't originate within the company.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#338

Post by elbowdashizzle » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:43 AM UTC

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.

The man has its flaws but to deny that he has been a very good operator is just putting your head in the sand.

- acquired WhatsApp and Instagram and grew them into the most popular apps on the planet - created an gigantic ad business that enables entire new types of SMBs to exist that rely on Meta to find their customers - which is pretty much a money volcano - bought a ton of GPUs right at the inflection of early LLM take-off

None of this was obvious when he started Facebook but obviously well executed in hindsight.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#339

Post by cdud3 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:45 AM UTC

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”.

Because this companies defined the goal to replace humans with AI what didn't happen. What happened is that the humans can work faster and have more coffee breaks while the AI iterates for the next review and iteration round by that human.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#340

Post by ElProlactin » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:50 AM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #314

dfedbeef wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it's going to be a tough couple of decades, not just years.

Of course I don't know either way. However, I feel like it's going to be different, but maybe not apocalyptic. The market I am building for is photographers, and from what I can gather (and know first hand as a customer) is that there's real discontent with the toolmakers in our ecosystem. It seems like in the quest for every tech company to become a multi-billion dollar empire, they've lost the plot on making hammer…

But even the market for "photographers" is arguably in secular decline. Smartphones and AI have turned everyone into a photographer. The world is awash in visual content.