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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

#431

Post by throwaw12 »

kvgr wrote: post #428
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…

Back in the day there was a mantra: best amount od code is 0. Now we have agents spitting lines after lines. I am not afraid of my future. Even if one person can do work of 5, the amount of generated code will grow exponentially. And not everything can he vibecoded with 0 knowledge. There is a complexity that need understanding to change and optimize. For now :)

> Back in the day there was a mantra: best amount od code is 0.

It was true for that time, because producing and maintaining the code was done by humans with limited speed of comprehension.

Today, we might challenge this assumption (not saying its wrong or right), because migrations can be done in 1-2 weeks with hundreds of agents.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#432

Post by hatefulheart »

hlynurd wrote: post #423
hatefulheart wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, what’s the question? Genuinely not sure. I’ll rephrase, Zuckerberg would certainly enjoy agentic coding to be a wild success because it means less staff and more products he could fail to create.

It can both be a wild success and not what he expected.

These two not mutually exclusive?

“Wild success” and “going slower than expected”?

Wake me up when words have a meaning again.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#433

Post by Toutouxc »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #212
zamalek wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't have helped, sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48797883 Architectural decisions are not lintable.

You can have a separate LLM as a brutal enforcer of an architecture decision. Works pretty well in the right harness.

Wider architectural guidelines, yes. "How a senior developer in this company would do it" — not so much.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#434

Post by ben_w »

andrewaylett wrote: post #424
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…

The thing is: I could produce 2-3 times as much code as before _without_ an LLM, if I didn't care about my colleagues' ability to review my output properly. Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time.

> Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality.

> A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time.

Absolutely true, however my experience says that the correlation between "good software engineering practices" and "positive business outcomes" is, at best, small.

120 kloc mostly from one single developer copy-pasting and keeping non-compilable code for an obsolete target "for reference" for a decade, becoming both a ball of mud and a whole pantheon of god classes? No unit tests, no code review? Won awards.

Properly engineered, mandatory code review, mandatory unit tests, dev meetings to knowledge-share? People with the money said too slow, closed it down.

(Sometimes people bring up how bad Musk's code was at PayPal. I never bothered investigating. Successful product though, wasn't it?)

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#435

Post by neonstatic »

apsurd wrote: post #390
dsego wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We take for granted a lot of things, doesn't mean they meaningfully contribute to our lives, why is face tagging or thumbs up so special? I believe we already had upvotes and reactions on other platforms like early forums and chat platforms. Even if it was the first one to popularize it, it didn't really come about in a vacuum, the Web 2.0 at that time was all about user engagement and interactions.

Zuck is a world class operator. He’s led one of the top richest companies of all time. I think the world is worse for it but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The list is just to refute the idea that it was one weird trick that gave him the keys to the planet. and it’s not about him being first or coding it himself, it’s that it happened with him at the helm. that’s just how it goes.

> Zuck is a world class operator.

I think his recent fumbles ironically prove your point. How many people could afford to fail so many times in a row (Remember their crypto coin? VR? Now LLMs?) and still be in the big leagues?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#437

Post by alex1138 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #350
arikrahman wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hear reverence around Myspace. Is it really rose-tinted nostalgia? It seemed like a cool core product.

MySpace gave users a lot of freedom. That was great in certain scenarios but at it got bigger it meant there was just more noise and the general atmosphere was very messy for lack of a better word. Facebook was very clean by comparison and it felt natural to connect to people who couldn't handle MySpace, people in your family or at work etc. Then eventually it got big enough through that that it just became the place…

Yes and then Facebook did everything they could to subvert granular privacy controls (Myspace was decent, it had a wall but that was about it) which is of paramount importance for people with real safety issues

FB would have been invented. It's just another layer of authentication anyway. Myspace was an interesting experiment for its time

...Comparisons of Tom to Zuck are rife I'm aware but somehow Myspace isn't known for "they trust me, dumb fucks"

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#438

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

Make sure to have an agent audit your codebase for redundant code and dead code

When you come back to the codebase in two weeks or a few months, the agent just redoes stuff

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#439

Post by bmitch3020 »

I can't imagine they'd ever get enough people to opt-in to mouse tracking to generate enough data for their model training. It's either a DOA AI project, employees will be pressured into accepting it (making it part of their review), or their managers will accept the monitoring on their behalf.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#440

Post by hahahaa »

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…

I agree there is a skill change but agents aren't people so managing them is very different. E.g. you can spin up 1000 agents. Get them inti tight loops and get them more context and so on. A manager doesn't do that with people.
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