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

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#531

Post by thorncorona » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

cafebabbe wrote: post #520

everdrive wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Honest question, is there a single successful large investment made by Meta recently ? I just know about the abject failures :)

Meta retooled all their internal models to be LEM / LLM based recently.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#532

Post by 1970-01-01 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:28 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.

He didn't "get lucky" with Facebook. He put in the time and effort to build, dropping out of Harvard, etc. It's all very well documented.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#533

Post by losvedir » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

By "AI agent development" does he mean using agents and such for in-house coding? Or does he mean their initiative to train their own agentic model based on the data he's having a bunch of employees generate?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#534

Post by hughw » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

DanielHB wrote: post #458

andrewaylett wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I have been saying this for years, I once had a heated argument about a small system of maybe 1000 lines of code that was technically superior and more scalable but was freaking 1000 lines of code to maintain compared to the quick and dirty 10 lines of code it was suppose to abstract and make generic (for future use of course). That with also countless debates over insig…

I wonder though if, as long as you have LLMs to maintain the extra code, it's worth it to gain the new feature. Less tech debt than your intuition expects.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#535

Post by LtWorf » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

cdud3 wrote: post #339

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”.

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.

And the human will not bother to review that mass of code and will just approve so the real test will happen in production.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#536

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

happyPersonR wrote: post #507

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.

The most correct opinion No disrespect to anyone that worked or works at meta: We can build a better version of his whole platform in 30 mins.

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#537

Post by diegolas » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

cdud3 wrote: post #339

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”.

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.

why would companies who build tools for developers say they'd want to replace humans with AI? it was never the goal, it was never stated like that. they said that by the end of 2026 most of the code being output would be generated by LLMs, and is pretty much true.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#538

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

sesteel wrote: post #525

ahartmetz wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's incredibly rich. Americans greatly respect rich people, the richer the more respect. It's apparently a bizarre reinterpretation/misunderstanding of Calvinism.

The respect only goes as far as to listen to what they have to say. We navigate our experience based on the whims of the rich so it helps to know what they are thinking, but it certainly doesn't confer much respect. Most are completely out of touch.

I trolled there, with a kernel of truth. The neutral version is that wealth is a contributor to respect that's unusually strong in the US and I do think that it goes back to Calvinism.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#539

Post by steveBK123 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #475

skybrian wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Right, these are actual physical real world problems that aren't going away just because it would be easier for agentic workflows.

Another example - agentic food ordering. How much more convenient would this make your life vs how much of an error rate would you tolerate if the cost/repercussions are on you?

Would a customer be happy if 2% of the time it sends 20 pizzas to a random address in their contacts list instead of 2 pizzas to their own home? Or 5% of the time it completely ignores your dietary restrictions/allergies and orders an entire meal of food you explicitly told it you cannot eat?

Real world problems don't go away just because it would make the tech neater & tidier.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#540

Post by gehsty » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:44 PM UTC

No one needs Meta AI. They have missed the boat with chatbots / agents / harnesses like Claude Code.

Can you picture anyone you know stopping using the AI services they currently use for an AI service provided by Meta?

They have such huge opportunities in selling access to their data centres to Anthropic etc, and improving their own ad models for better targeted adds (using their proprietary data and their own infra!), it is maddening to watch them try to make SOTA LLM models and harnesses no one will ever use.