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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

#481

Post by hatefulheart »

baq wrote: post #473
hatefulheart wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure thing, just like I’ve been checking back on people over the last 3 years. I’ll hit you up too.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#482

Post by sidewndr46 »

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.

This is one of the things I ran into early on. LLM needs to compute the determinant of a matrix? Sure, just spit out some huge hyper optimized implementation of it. Good luck maintaining that. Slapping "use industry standard open source libraries for common functions" has improved the quality of LLM output for me by such a large margin.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#483

Post by p_kuni »

cube00 wrote: post #226
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…

> Whatever you can do to create deterministic gates that the LLM simply must overcome to reach a “done” state, do it. First thing Gemini did when I tried that was turn off all the rules in eslint.config.mjs claiming they were "overly stylistic" Yes, it got better once I explicitly told it not to disable any rules, so I accept I was holding it wrong but I do worry just how many footguns it puts into other things becau…

Why does your harness allow the LLM to generate output that can disable rules & checks?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#484

Post by everdrive »

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.

I don't like Zuckerberg whatsoever, but there are plenty of reasons you could potentially care about his opinion:

- He could be well-placed to see whether AI agent development is successful since at a high level he oversees much of it, and will be getting detailed metrics and things.

- Whether or not his opinion is correct, tech CEOs are notorious trend-chasers, and his opinion could set the tone for other companies.

- He himself might even be a trend-follower in this case, and is presiding over an early dialing-back of AI-hype.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#485

Post by 5701652400 »

dbuser99 wrote: post #478
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.

1 ex-PHP-dev CEO != 100,000+ SWEs who actually build technology of FB/Meta/IG/Whasapp

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#486

Post by nickjj »

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…

> Some devs just 'get it' and thrive, leading a team really well and building a great culture.

I don't think it's this because the outcome you get from AI isn't controllable. You can give it the best prompts and design suggestions and it'll still give you completely wrong or horribly written code.

If you were a manager and one of your reports kept producing completely wrong and horribly written code that other folks on the team keep bringing up as problematic in PR reviews or privately, that developer would eventually be fired for someone better.

But in the AI case, there is no replacement because all of the LLMs have severe problems.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#487

Post by baq »

hatefulheart wrote: post #481
baq wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure thing, just like I’ve been checking back on people over the last 3 years. I’ll hit you up too.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

We're riding an exponential here for Pete's sake.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#488

Post by 5701652400 »

dbuser99 wrote: post #478
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.

what does "runs" actually mean? zoom calls from his private Hawai island to a bunch of buddies other C-level execs?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#489

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#490

Post by theturtletalks »

birdsongs wrote: post #469
theturtletalks wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t take my word for it then, ask any terminal agent to dig in and get an idea of how good these apps are. In the end, I built Openship and Openfront for my e-commerce business and then turned them into SaaS. All the revenue for these are just a cherry on top of our existing e-commerce businesses. And I worked with Next and Keystone long before AI came along. Check my GitHub commits if you need some back story. And…

> Don’t take my word for it then, ask any terminal agent to dig in and get an idea of how good these apps are. Okay but, you know this isn't a quality metric right? These models are incredibly biased towards positive confirmation of the prompt. I could give them nearly any repo and they would sing the praises of the best parts, if I asked. This sounds a bit like psychosis.

I never told you what prompt to even feed your AI my guy. As far as I know, you can be like rip this repo to shreds and tell me what’s wrong with it and you’ll get your answer.

Crazy how you guys blindly trust proprietary apps where you can’t even read the code but asking you to read open-source code is psychosis?

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