HN

Comments (256)

• Menu

  efficax
  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, but if I want it to be good, to be stable, to do what the product manager and designers want, it's only about 2 to 3 times more code than before. And that productivity is impacted by the fact that I'm reviewing 2 to 3 times more code than before (and you have to review, even more so now than before, because if you just let opus or gpt 5 do its thing, you'll get some terrible results, and I've found a lot of engineers on my team are just letting it do it's thing without a lot of iteration).
• Menu

  simonw
  This is a thinner TechCrunch rewrite of this Reuters story: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-z...The exact quote appears to be:> In retrospect, he said, the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," and that the company's bets on the new structure "haven't come to fruition yet." Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.Hard to guess exactly what he means by "trajectory of the agentic development" but my best guess is that he means that Meta's own internal efforts to improve the agent (aka longer form tool-using) capabilities of their own in-house models hasn't improved to the point that they can drive an agent harness like Codex or Claude Code in a comparable manner to the best OpenAI and Anthropic models.At a further guess, that was part of their goal in reassigning large numbers of employees to help label data for their AI efforts.
• Menu

  vishalkundar
  The gap between "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" is way bigger than people realize. A chatbot can be wrong 10% of the time and still help you. An agent that's wrong 10% of the time is sending bad emails and making wrong API calls with no one checking.
• loeg
  > said a review of a recent data security incident with the company's controversial mouse-tracking software indicated that no employee data was included in AI training.That's... not quite right. The employee data is used in AI training and is intended to be used this way. But despite not correctly ACLing the data for a couple weeks, it is believed it was not accessed inappropriately.
• Menu

  _fat_santa
  I think what everyone underestimated was the absolute bonkers amount of compute it will take and how that compute must scale in order to keep up with larger and larger models.
• jsemrau
  The last two years have been perfect for accumulating tech debt.2023 you would have probably implemented your Agents with LangChain and RAG2025 you'd use MCP and OpenAI/Anthropic Agent SDK.2027 you will use a workspace frameworks (Amazon, Microsoft) sensor libraries and world models.Agents are a fantastic generational technologies, but in mid-2026 the environment they are operating in is quickly changing.The only way forward is to stay agile, understand model and vendor risk.
• balls187
  The company that helps connect kids with the adults who want to harm them is having a hard time replacing humans? Shocking.
• Menu

  mattas
  There's a disconnect between measured productivity and "anecdotal" productivity. I love this chart because it also demonstrates one of the most effective ways to increase productivity: simply reducing the workforce.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
• Menu

  mullingitover
  Having agents is like going from walking to having a bicycle.Business executives look at this and think "at this rate of progress we'll have self-driving cars in a few years!" and start making serious plans for that world.In reality I think we're going to be riding bikes for a long time. That situation of increased individual contributor productivity makes engineers more valuable, and increases the utility of engineers rather than making them a burden on your budget.Thus, cutting headcount right as they had huge potential to become vastly more productive was a stupid move. It's an admission that you don't know how to manage people effectively, which is embarrassing when you're paid mountains of money for your management skills.
• panny
  Maybe Zuck is doing the soft walk back so he can justify a few more H1Bs now that he laid off lots of expensive Americans.
• Menu

  segmondy
  The failure that is llama4 needs to be studied. Meta was kicking ass with llama3.x and then something happened, something really went wrong. what happened between that time and llama4? I think it happened after llama3.1, llama3.2 was nothing to write home about. We need the gossips, maybe a book
• Menu

  natbennett
  This article is at least the sixth restatement of a single Reuters article that has been posted here.
• slashdave
  > that executives had miscalculated on the timing of the changesHmmm... so who is going to be thrown under the bus?
• lilerjee
  AI hype comes quickly, and goes with the wind quickly as well.
• HarHarVeryFunny
  You'd have thought that Zuck's previous failures to make the things he dreams about (e.g. Metaverse, decent in-house AI) materialize might have made him a bit more cautious about betting the farm on things that don't exist, especially when he's expecting someone else (the AI agent folks) to make it happen!I suppose you have to admire the conviction: I'll fire my developers today because REAL SOON NOW I'll be able to replace them with AGI!
• sheeshkebab
  there are plenty of orgs where writing more code is not a good thing, in fact it's the last thing they want. but yet these orgs would still employ 80%+ of all developers, not necessarily to write code though.
• haddr
  So what happened to Meta after those successful llama 3 model releases? They really made competing models back then. If felt like they have right people, strategy and good results. Now it feels they have neither of those…
• sebringj
  with coding, you have sort of a framework for doing it right, if you have good specs, good testing practices, strict grounding in expected results deterministically, good linting, etc... this is much easier to automate with AI for the coding part within that assuming you did your homework around it... i don't have experience with all the business layers but it seems a bit more nuanced and fuzzy as you get away from that "harness" of sorts as it doesn't have to work in the same way as code for execution and evaluation... and even if code works, it still needs tastemakers in the final ok. maybe the taste maker ability still needs a lot of work/scale to be feasible, idk, like its still earlier than later on that. maybe Elon already cracked this to an extent given his automation in various companies.
• Menu

  NewsaHackO
  I feel as thought Meta, compared to other tech giants, have a vested interest in saying that AI failed, as they are the only major tech company that has almost unequivocally lost the AI race.
• _the_inflator
  I think that over long developers will desperately be needed to handle AI.In my experience, within weeks now concepts written in stone get shattered and the next paradigm has to be used in order to max out AI in an development environment.What is the case for AI? To handle basic work? Augment the work? Add work?Why I think dev will be in a good spot if they adapt is the simple fact, that while laymen are using ChatGPT etc. every day, this is like driving a Tesla vs a formula 1 car.If you take ChatGPT away from the laymen, they are helpless with IT. Devs aren't.AI isn't static, and every turn evolves into complexity, only devs may handle when they adapt to frequent paradigm shifts and go into high level mode.It will be again the interface between men and machine, laymen and AI. The gap won't close anytime as expected (The programming manager - remember 6 month ago?), but widens more and more.What I see is that in day to day work many services have arms race with AI updates. The managers are more and more overwhelmed by the workload but how to automate systems is still devs' area to shine.The business case is still hidden and unclear, but only one aspect is clear to me: low level programming is mostly configuration work now and bug fixing for AI very seldomly now.
• Menu

  shimman
  Can't think of a better poster child of complete corporate waste that benefits no one whose assets should be seized and redistributed to the masses.For the amount that Meta wastes on LLM spending you can pay for things like universal childcare, public community college, and providing free lunch to all public students.If you care about things like money, look up the dollar returns on feeding children during their development or when you tell families they don't have be an economic burden for simply existing.A better world is possible.
• Menu

  throwaway27448
  I wonder when he'll admit his hopes were baseless
• Menu

  ilaksh
  My instinct (for better or worse) is usually contrarian. Most people seem very skeptical of what Meta is doing with AI. But, what if, in a way at least, it makes sense?Maybe Wang has correctly identified that the programming and agentic ability that Anthropic and OpenAI models have has largely come from armies of software engineers creating massive datasets by writing out coding and agentic problems and solutions?So he told Zuckerberg that. The reason it may be turning into so much friction is that at companies like Anthropic or OpenAI, training engineers were either hired specifically for that purpose or probably mostly handled through contracts with third parties (which again, hired them to train AI). And honestly many of them may be overseas or just happy to have a job in a difficult period. But anyway they wouldn't have very high salary expectations etc.But Zuckerberg already had 25000 engineers. Why not take say 1/5 of them and get them working on the the dataset? The problem is that those engineers were hired for different prestigious highly paid positions at Meta/Facebook. They were not hired to do tedious grading of AI answers or quiz construction.But Zuckerberg either has to do this, or spend additional billions on doing it all with external contractors. A third option would be to try to create a massive distillation operation. Or just hope that his engineers could invent some magical new training trick that manifested the agentic and programming skills without the large scale human input.Or he could release a model trained largely by existing open weights models. Which without some huge breakthrough probably has no chance of surpassing them, so is pointless.I think most of the substantive criticism of Zuckerberg has been about burning funds. If he gives up the "your job is to grade AI homework now" plan because his engineers refuse, he would need to go through third parties. The additional billions and billions this would cost would create more pressure on the bottom line and shareholder pressure.It would also give up any potential advantage that Wang may have optimistically sold the operation as, on that using "real" engineers as opposed to lower paid data labelling engineers might result in a higher quality dataset.At some point, model architectures that don't need such massive datasets or can be created automatically in a way that advances the frontier will probably come about. But right now it doesn't exist.Further, the way AI works currently, business advantage from AI comes from encoding existing internal intelligence and knowledge. Meta's massive engineering corp effectively has that in their heads. Having them create these datasets is possibly the only way to leverage this knowledge asset in this paradigm.I guess the problem is it means forcing thousands of people to do a different job from the one they were hired for.
• Menu

  alkyon
  I wonder what will be the next big thing for Zuck after metaverse failure and now AI coming to nothing? Perpetual motion machines?
• booi
  Have they tried feeding macadamia nuts to the llama?
• ahartmetz
  Aka I thought the stuff that these other guys are doing was not so difficult. No one can replace me, of course.Many such cases.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  amelius
  "I was hoping AI had progressed enough so I could fire you. But you failed to make it so. Therefore, you're fired!"
• AnotherGoodName
  I'm guessing this is specifically about Avocado which everyone at Meta would acknowledge is terrible.
• skeledrew
  I think there are seriously misplaced expectations here. The primary role of AI is transference of effort, while "increased productivity" is just a side-effect (since computers are so much faster than humans at highly repetitive tasks). It's about not having to directly do X anymore (or as often), even though it may take a few rounds to get X to a satisfactory point. But even if following up is needed, most of the effort budget can then be used for Y.Also those with very heavy investment in AI are looking for bonkers results, which is the cause of their disappointment. They need to reduce their expectations. I for one am loving the results so far.
• roschdal
  AI agents are no good.
• nitwit005
  > At the time, he said, executives were "super optimistic" about tools like Claude Code from AI startup Anthropic.Some guy in sales at Anthropic has a new yacht though.
• mmooss
  If a Meta employee screws up a major project, what happens? What will happen to the executives behind these mass firings and realignment - executives of one of the very top SV companies whose job is dealing with the landscape of disruptive technology development and overreacted to the latest thing? What is the standard for them?
• adam12
  Maybe they'd make faster progress if they worked in the Metaverse.
• Menu

  throwatdem12311
  Why don’t they just got Claude Fable to do it for them? Are they stupid?
• Menu

  dude250711
  Who is the genius who told him development will get faster?The man can't catch a break!
• Menu

  threethirtytwo
  why havent big tech employees formed a union?
• Menu

  holoduke
  Mark is really a bad leader with a mwah mwah vision. He is maybe correct in some things. But the execution is really really poor. Plus he does not have followers and believers. He only got money that can simulate followers to a certain extent
• ChrisArchitect
  Related:Meta’s chaotic AI strategyhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461
• morkalork
  Did they really think they could record all their employees screens for a couple months and one-shot the agent thing? This is like junior engineer "let's refactor this monolith" levels of delusion.
• alex1138
  I'm sorry if it's a non sequitur but I feel even beyond superintelligence/AI/LLM whatever of the last few years... they've always done this, it's always been somewhat hamfistedExamples abound of "I reported Nazi hate page. Didn't violate community guidelines. I called my friend a jerk, jokingly, got a month banFor years. Not restricted to when ChatGPT et al arrived on the scene(Because, AI in theory makes sense. If you want to monitor things at scale you might use AI - however that's defined - to make your workload easier. When is an account being hijacked? When are bad actors infiltrating the system? Or whatever)
• Menu

  penpendian
  i bet he wants some calculative shit
• Menu

  yanhangyhy
  i blame Wang!
• mikgp
  [dead]
• VerityLayer
  [flagged]
• ihsw
  [dead]
• Ozzie-D
  [flagged]
• jocelyner
  [dead]
• raychis
  [dead]
• GreyOcten
  [flagged]
• kubb
  How does he get to decide what's "enough"? Reality will tell us, he can only place bets, whether it pans out isn't something that he has any say in.