Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 661 posts

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#411

Post by rob74 »

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…

Yes, an agent does feel like a very eager and very knowledgeable but also very clueless junior developer sometimes. But no, working with agents is not like leading a team of developers. You don't have to make sure an agent stays motivated, give it the feeling that its work is valued (I can let an agent spend some time building a prototype and then decide not to use it, if I did the same thing with something a junior developer took a week to build, that probably wouldn't be a good idea) etc.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#412

Post by noodletheworld »

onion2k wrote: post #343
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”.

The bit I don't have evidence for is whether or not teaching ICs to be managers would improve how they use agentic AI. I have plenty of evidence for the efficacy and effectiveness of AI itself (although not qualitative or obviously causal unfortunately.)

> plenty of evidence … although not qualitative or obviously causal

Those two things are the opposite of each other (evidence, but only anecdotally; you cant be both).

Anyway.

More tangible to your argument; what is your argument that this will be more effective than just prompt engineering?

Ive long believed that prompt engineering is a losers game; if there is a trivial set of tricks that improve the output, they will simply be automatically applied.

We see this playing out with the system prompts in coding agents and image gen.

The value of learning “photo realistic studio lighting…” was non existent. The nano banana api is capable of taking a naive prompt and expanding it with these tricks.

People who devoted themselves to learning these “magical incantations” wasted their time and effort; and it was obvious, from the beginning this would be true.

Now.

With managing agents; if a trivial set of management tricks can drastically improve the results, why are you better off learning them now, rather than waiting for them to be baked into cursor/codex/claude in easy mode?

What makes you believe this is a valuable investment in time and effort?

Even if we accept that right now assigning personas to agents and managing them as a manager yields good results, the horizon for change right now is so short, it seems extraordinary to suggest mass management and leadership training for engineers.

We should just wait and see.

All in investments like this would just be tokenmaxing in a funny hat.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#413

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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 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.

I disagree.

From ICs that I lead, I expect that they learn fast. On the other hand, LLMs are basically incapable of improving.

Another issue that I can see is that I don't particularly like eager new colleagues who come up with (hallucinate) wrong answers. At the beginning, if you are uncertain, learn, and if you have questions that learning does not answer by itself, ask questions. But strongly avoid hallucinating answers. New colleagues can be taught that, LLMs not so.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#416

Post by onion2k »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #413
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…

> 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. I disagree. From ICs that I lead, I expect that they learn fast. On the other hand, LLMs are basically incapable of improving. Another issue that I can see is that I don't particularly like eager new c…

New colleagues can be taught that, LLMs not so.

LLMs can be 'taught' though. You can give them additional context or instructions. The difference is that they can't really teach themselves.

This is roughly what I'm saying - someone who's managing an IC can steer them on the right course, and someone who's managing an agent can also steer it on the right course, so teaching someone how to handle ICs well gives them skills that are also applicable to handling agents well.

It's not perfectly analogous obviously because ICs are people and need to be managed as people, but I really think the skills are quite transferable in one direction. I'll add that I don't think someone learning to manage agents would necessarily become a good people manager.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#417

Post by redsocksfan45 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #177
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…

To reply to myself here.. I can STILL replicate this behavior in Google AI summaries 10% of the time: "is ok for cats" to which it replies: "Yes, is toxic for cats" The other one going around this weekend: "how long hot dogs on grill" Summary: "The hot dogs on your grill are likely around 5-6 inches long .. " So scale this category of error to unsupervised agents with access to your credit card.

[dead]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#418

Post by diffeomorphism »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #409
diffeomorphism wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a "failure" means it fails to meet its success criteria. If you claim 10x and deliver 3x, that is a failure. The 3x may still be impressive or a gamechanger or ..., but it still falls short of its promises.

So what? Who cares about such a binary claims?

People making decisions.

Pay me 8x to get 10x, great. Pay me 8x to get 3x, nope.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#420

Post by whateverboat »

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…

The problem often is that the new manager can teach their hires to write better code and train them to be new managers. Given that a team leader in such a scenario is often checking for correctness, I am not sure if current LLM based AI will ever be able to do it. We need new AI for it.
Post reply on HN