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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

#611

Post by miltava »

ben_w wrote: post #503
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…

> Survivorship bias The statistical problem is small sample size, not survivorship bias, as I got to see things before failure. These two examples are merely illustrative of things I've seen.

I think both are at play here and I don’t know about Musk’s programming skills. But it seems that they had other very good programmers (including levchin). So maybe business success can buy good engineers to clean the messed up code. I’m not sure how it goes with AI now though.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#612

Post by andrewaylett »

hughw wrote: post #534
DanielHB wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would an LLM be any more capable of maintaining the extra code than I am?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#613

Post by andrewaylett »

ben_w wrote: post #434
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. 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, sm…

There's a trade-off to be made, and it's not necessarily clear where the trade-off sits for any particular company, or even team within the company.

One product person described it as eating vs breathing. Availability is like breathing: if you stop being available (including, but not limited to, because your software is a big ball of mud) then you're going to die pretty quickly. Product is like eating: you might not die so quickly but if no-one's buying what you're selling then you're still not going to survive.

The team I'm part of is a platform team, so we're closer to being lungs than being stomach. We can (and I appreciate being able to) focus more on stability than feature development.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#614

Post by pipes »

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…

I'm really struggling to get an agent to write code I'm happy with. It's mostly pretty awful.

I've a fairly simple c# coding style. But simple is proving a bit more difficult to convey than I thought.

I get it to produce code. I then have to spend along time convincing myself it's correct. If I don't I end up embarrassing myself when a coworker reviews it, questions it and it's obvious I don't properly understand it.

This is really starting to screw with me mentally. It's like everyone in the world is saying they can fly by flapping their arms (dark factories). When I try I just stay in the same spot burning a lot of energy.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#615

Post by hughw »

andrewaylett wrote: post #612
hughw wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would an LLM be any more capable of maintaining the extra code than I am?

Sure man, knock yourself out.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#616

Post by jmcqk6 »

ben_w wrote: post #434
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. 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, sm…

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

One of the most uncomfortable truths about our profession is that there is no floor to how bad software can be while still making people billions of dollars.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#617

Post by budsniffer952 »

andrewaylett wrote: post #612
hughw wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would an LLM be any more capable of maintaining the extra code than I am?

Because it can read and understand the code base far beyond your ability.

You can pretend that's not true, but it is. And it's only going to get better.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#618

Post by stasomatic »

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…

As a hobbyist coder, I wonder how much more new code, fundamentally, there needs to be? New devices need new firmware, new cars etc, but how much of that is bespoke? Sure, a new movie or a book is new entertainment, but I've already seen that movie and read that book, they just had different jackets. What do these "engineers" actually do that is novel and how much of the pizza is the novel slice is?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#619

Post by budsniffer952 »

epolanski wrote: post #610
eiifr1 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Damn you folks are legit stupid. You're definitely out of the line with such language. And naive. Your biggest error is thinking that: 1. there's quality software out there. It's definitely far from the industry standard, even in high budget big techs, far from it 2. that people opening the wallet care about software quality. good has been always better than perfect 3. that the average PR review has significant imp…

Don't bother my man. All of the commenters talk about the "bad code" AI writes as if the code that's out there in the world isn't also compete garbage.

Of course, everyone here is in the 99th percentile in ability, am I right?

The sheer number of people I'm meeting that say about trivial things "AI cant do that" is astonishing.

Oh well.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#620

Post by HWR_14 »

jurip wrote: post #581
HWR_14 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs was. Elon Musk is. Outside of tech Warren Buffett seems popular.

I don't know what the baseline is for CEO popularity (I guess most people don't know that many CEOs by name?) but I'd be hard-pressed to call a 37/50 favorable/unfavorable ratio popular: https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate...

Maybe he's no longer popular, but he had a cameo in Iron Man 2 and hosted SNL. That speaks to popularity.

Also, is favorable/unfavorable a good measure of popularity?

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