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

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#471

Post by bsenftner » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:50 AM UTC

aiisjustanif wrote: post #467

hatefulheart wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivorship bias, you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise, or a product that is possible within constraints that otherwise could have been a success, but not realised by sloppy work and incompetence. Furthermore the dependencies you choose to build your product are presumably filtered for engine…

> you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise Trying to ignore the nuance is hard in your position or the following one I’ll give is difficult.. but is the opposite potentially true as well? We don’t know how many projects failed because of over optimizing, too much time spent on design and engineeri…

Well, that's the other side of incompetence: they know how to spin their tools, but they don't know when to stop, or how to stop the change requests, the balance between shippable, maintainable, and what the market wants at that time.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#472

Post by epolanski » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:56 AM UTC

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.

I think that coding reviews are no longer feasible as they used to.

The pace and expectations have increased and a human can barely cope with reviewing its own code, let alone colleagues'.

They are not going to disappear in critical aspects of a codebase, nor shouldn't, but the industry will eventually reward self sufficient individuals able to keep the pace, harness and run adversarial reviews against the design and implementation autonomously.

I'll also say the harsh truth. A well implemented adversarial flow will do either better than your peers or will deliver 95% of the value at a fraction of the cost.

The industry has never valued product, let alone code quality except in places they are core to the business.

Otherwise you would not have MIT-bred leetcode ninjas writing react/tailwind bugged monstrosities at half a million/year for billion dollar products.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#473

Post by baq » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:58 AM UTC

hatefulheart wrote: post #327

m00x wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attac…

On the other side of this you have two companies growing revenue literally the fastest ever in any market segment, just for said tech. Somebody is spending this money and thinks it's worth it. Let's check back in six months.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#474

Post by hatefulheart » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:58 AM UTC

aiisjustanif wrote: post #467

hatefulheart wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivorship bias, you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise, or a product that is possible within constraints that otherwise could have been a success, but not realised by sloppy work and incompetence. Furthermore the dependencies you choose to build your product are presumably filtered for engine…

> you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise Trying to ignore the nuance is hard in your position or the following one I’ll give is difficult.. but is the opposite potentially true as well? We don’t know how many projects failed because of over optimizing, too much time spent on design and engineeri…

I understand and of course I am familiar with the hypothetical you are trying to set up here but I was specifically pointing out a logical fallacy I see banded round all the time by people who should know better or educate themselves.

I will say that if “good engineering practices” comes up in your root cause analysis for a failure to launch a product you are not thinking critically.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#475

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #185

steveBK123 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This to me is the big leap from being good at coding to being good at many other tasks. Coding could be treated as a low stakes (time & money consequences for retries) closed loop system where most other tasks cannot. If it screws up booking your flight/hotel room, how does the agent verify this, and even if it verifies.. there is an actual cost to changes/cancellations. Similar with agentic e-commerce, lots of abili…

Seems like to make agents safe we need tentative, reversible transactions. How do you set up a travel plan and then review it? How do you modify it later? Unfortunately, travel keeps getting less flexible, with worse cancelation policies.

There is no way to do cheap and flexible air travel. If the tickets are cheap, than just a few last minute cancellations can destroy your margin for that flight, if you were to offer them for free. Add in the the risk of your seat reservations being gamed by filling up seats and then canceling, and you get a recipe for disaster.

Trains are usually different because they are much cheaper to operate per trip (for the train operator, not the track operators, but that's a different discussion), so running a half empty train is much less of a problem - especially since you don't need to plan for how much fuel to use ahead of time.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#476

Post by andreygrehov » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:01 PM UTC

Who cares what Zuckerberg says about AI agents? He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook. He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher. What authority does he have to speak on the future of AI agents? Morale at his company is at an ATL, and that says more about his leadership skills he'd better off focusing on, otherwise the agents might replace him soon.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#477

Post by aiisjustanif » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:03 PM UTC

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…

> make them much better at using agentic swarms.

Do you mostly use agentic swarms? If so, I’d be curious of your use cases. People talk about “managing agentic swarms” a decent bit, especially on LinkedIn. I just don’t see how they are the best solution for majority of development use cases. At best they seem like using only a hammer to make sculpture.. or a sandwich.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#478

Post by dbuser99 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:04 PM UTC

andreygrehov wrote: post #476

Who cares what Zuckerberg says about AI agents? He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook. He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher. What authority does he have to speak on the future of AI agents? Morale at his company is at an ATL, and that says more about his leadership skills he'd better off focusing on, otherwise the agents might replace him soon.

Yea he only runs one of the biggest technology companies in the world.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#479

Post by resonious » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:10 PM UTC

aiisjustanif wrote: post #467

hatefulheart wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivorship bias, you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise, or a product that is possible within constraints that otherwise could have been a success, but not realised by sloppy work and incompetence. Furthermore the dependencies you choose to build your product are presumably filtered for engine…

> you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise Trying to ignore the nuance is hard in your position or the following one I’ll give is difficult.. but is the opposite potentially true as well? We don’t know how many projects failed because of over optimizing, too much time spent on design and engineeri…

Over optimizing and spending too much time on engineering decisions is also something an incompetent development team would do.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#480

Post by philipp-gayret » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:12 PM UTC

My diagnosis is.. You are working with people. Smart ones at that, who have been working for a very long time in their own, niche, specific way. To assume all engineers will become AI-pilled like you and hop on Claude Code whenever asked is the wrong approach. You can make the greatest tools, but if it doesn't fit in the behaviour and the way of working of the engineer, they will simply discard it.

I see this issue with clients and prospects all the time. A client's team of 5 produces 1 foobar widget in 2 weeks. That's 50 human days spent. Then, someone demonstrates the same thing can be produced (at an equal ot higher level of quality, mind you) with AI in 2 hours. Management might celebrate but teams will continue programming by hand as they always have, now asking ChatGPT about their build tool errors instead of using Stack Overflow.

Handing out tools and telling them it's cool is not enough. You'll need to understand, work with, and guide the engineering teams properly step by step. You'll have to change their behaviour. That does not happen overnight. Unfortunately the present approach is to drop the people who don't perform in the new era of AI-assisted software engineering. That is not the right approach in my eyes.