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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

#621

Post by epolanski »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #619
epolanski wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In all of that I'm not saying good engineering practices are bad, I'm speculating that the economics will push towards strong individuals soloing features at good code quality.

Bogging down strong contributors into reviewing code, now that there's more work to review in the first place might be not economically feasible unless the code is critical to the business.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#622

Post by nickjj »

pohl wrote: post #599
nickjj wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I don’t have a dog in this fight but it seems you’re not accounting for iteration and feedback. A horse will veer off of a road if not occasionally nudged to stay on it, but is useful transportation, nevertheless.

> I don’t have a dog in this fight but it seems you’re not accounting for iteration and feedback

You can provide AI official sources to look at and dozens of prompts. I've lost track of the number of times where it didn't arrive at the right answer with tons of opportunities to correct itself based on feedback.

Just an endless of sea of "you're absolutely right to have brought that up, I didn't think about that" and other phrases it constantly uses when it fails to provide a solution. Fast forward 20 minutes later and it starts providing the same nonsense it did at the beginning because it forgot what it already said.

The code solutions it provides are so consistently bad but it's not limited to code. I recently tried a YouTube feature where it can generate AI thumbnails from your video. The results were really lackluster. It completely ignored my feedback like "use a real webcam photo of me that you see in the video", to which the AI recreated a completely different looking human that wasn't me. It even swapped out my real glasses with a rendering of glasses I don't have and kept on making incorrect assumptions about everything. After about 10 prompts and 20 minutes of waiting for thumbnails I gave up, it was really poor.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#623

Post by tracker1 »

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 would add that a lot of that extra code is often in test/demo paths... I tend to think of working with an Agent as a "team" of 1 + agent... where the developer is now wearing a QA and PM hat in addition to lead/sr dev. That the work getting done is now roughly the offset of what a team would have produced and that coordination needs to step back and treat each individual with an agent as roughly a dev team. Coordination overhead and mythical man month still apply, just at a layer up.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#624

Post by pohl »

nickjj wrote: post #622
pohl wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don’t have a dog in this fight but it seems you’re not accounting for iteration and feedback. A horse will veer off of a road if not occasionally nudged to stay on it, but is useful transportation, nevertheless.

> I don’t have a dog in this fight but it seems you’re not accounting for iteration and feedback You can provide AI official sources to look at and dozens of prompts. I've lost track of the number of times where it didn't arrive at the right answer with tons of opportunities to correct itself based on feedback. Just an endless of sea of "you're absolutely right to have brought that up, I didn't think about that" and…

None of that supports the claim that it "isn't controllable," though. A curious mind should probably find it interesting that it can be fallible in those ways yet still be useful for producing work, and ask how both can be true at the same time.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#625

Post by foobarbecue »

PaulHoule wrote: post #600
foobarbecue wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite. What's "foxwork"?

I played enough video games to be thoroughly steeped in legends about fox spirits from the Sinosphere, almost three years ago I felt I received an invitation that I was a little afraid of. a year and a half ago I read https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231133383 and found out that people really do it. It took me about 300 days to contract with a community of foxes and started "going out as a fox". At first I didn't want to e…

Ah. I was expecting some technical jargon. You do you, man...

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#626

Post by SwellJoe »

smusamashah wrote: post #385
SwellJoe wrote: post #319

Zuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.

HN is so extreme sometimes. I remember when Llama was gaining popularity, everyone here was praising him for releasing open models. Same for other works in this area. Also remember praise for some VR devices. And it's all back to Facebook, nothing in between. It doesn't look any different from general population influenced by TV and other social media.

I am not HN. I'm just one guy. And, I have not, in recent memory, said anything nice about Zuckerberg.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#627

Post by [deleted] »

ffsm8 wrote: post #198
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this before: if anthropic (et al) thought they genuinely had a shot at replacing even 30% of white collar work, they would ABSOLUTELY NOT warn ANYONE. They would do what oil, leaded gas, and cigarette companies did. Swear under oath this is completely safe, commit GRIEVOUS societal harm that you explicitly promised wouldn't happen, and then end up in history books instead of jail for reasons beyond my abili…

Fwiw , you're conflating multiple things and consequently drawing premature conclusions. It can be massively over hyped for it's current capacity and decimate the white collar work. A lot of the difference of opinion is down to their point of view. At my dayjob, LLMs will not live up to anything because the enterprise is not structured to take advantage of it's strength. That's unlikely to change within the foreseeab…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#628

Post by ryandrake »

pipes wrote: post #614
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.…

I don't think everyone in the world is saying they can fly by flapping their arms. It's a small number of very vocal, very online, AI enthusiasts, many who have a financial stake in AI winning.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#629

Post by efficax »

pipes wrote: post #614
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.…

work from tests to implementation. Validate the tests, and work with the agent to ensure there are not more cases that need testing. Then you can let the agent implement the code and you can refine it until it's simple enough but covers the test cases. TDD is the only way to use agents effectively, imo

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#630

Post by bigbuppo »

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.

So it's like jazz... it's the code you didn't commit that matters?
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