- 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).
- 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.
by vishalkundar
4 subcomments
- 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.
- > he expects that the social media giant will begin to experience more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months.
He is hallucinating just like AI, and unable to come to terms with the facts on the ground. Meta has lost plot about 5 years back - with metaverse, VR, glasses and AI. They should sit back and think with a calm head, about what exactly their core product is. Unfortunately there is none, except a few acquired ones: whatsapp and instagram.
by mullingitover
2 subcomments
- 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.
by _fat_santa
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- 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.
- If AI was a productivity boon: wouldn't a company employ the same or more employees to capture more market share at a competitive edge. Shedding employees because they are more efficient seems like shooting yourself in the foot to try and stand in the same spot in a race.
AI should have caused a job market boon: because less skilled employees would have been more hirable/useful. That this is not the case leads me to suspect that AI is an excuse to reduce employee count, but not the root cause.
by philipp-gayret
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- My diagnosis is.. You are working with people. Smart ones at that, who have been working for a very long time in their own, niche, specific way. To assume all engineers will become AI-pilled like you and hop on Claude Code whenever asked is the wrong approach. You can make the greatest tools, but if it doesn't fit in the behaviour and the way of working of the engineer, they will simply discard it.
I see this issue with clients and prospects all the time. A client's team of 5 produces 1 foobar widget in 2 weeks. That's 50 human days spent. Then, someone demonstrates the same thing can be produced (at an equal ot higher level of quality, mind you) with AI in 2 hours. Management might celebrate but teams will continue programming by hand as they always have, now asking ChatGPT about their build tool errors instead of using Stack Overflow.
Handing out tools and telling them it's cool is not enough. You'll need to understand, work with, and guide the engineering teams properly step by step. You'll have to change their behaviour. That does not happen overnight. Unfortunately the present approach is to drop the people who don't perform in the new era of AI-assisted software engineering. That is not the right approach in my eyes.
by andreygrehov
18 subcomments
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- The last two years have been perfect for accumulating tech debt.
2023 you would have probably implemented your Agents with LangChain and RAG
2025 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.
by SwellJoe
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- 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.
- 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
by natbennett
2 subcomments
- This article is at least the sixth restatement of a single Reuters article that has been posted here.
by _the_inflator
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- 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.
- 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.
- > 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.
- The company that helps connect kids with the adults who want to harm them is having a hard time replacing humans? Shocking.
by NewsaHackO
3 subcomments
- 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.
- 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?
by bmitch3020
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- I can't imagine they'd ever get enough people to opt-in to mouse tracking to generate enough data for their model training. It's either a DOA AI project, employees will be pressured into accepting it (making it part of their review), or their managers will accept the monitoring on their behalf.
- 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…
- Reminder: the "expected" result is replaced all programmers and white collar employees. Even they don't necessarily state it explicitly, that's what is in their minds.
Anything less than that is slower than expected.
by HarHarVeryFunny
0 subcomment
- 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!
- I wonder what will be the next big thing for Zuck after metaverse failure and now AI coming to nothing? Perpetual motion machines?
- Have they tried feeding macadamia nuts to the llama?
- built an agent to handle my email triage. it now flags every message as "needs human review" and sends me a daily summary of how overwhelmed it is.
by throwaway27448
1 subcomments
- I wonder when he'll admit his hopes were baseless
- 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.
- 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.
- AI hype comes quickly, and goes with the wind quickly as well.
- Maybe if you spent 2 Billions in tokens instead of 1 Zucky.
- > that executives had miscalculated on the timing of the changes
Hmmm... so who is going to be thrown under the bus?
- Investor money being pissed up against the wall, for little purpose? What else is new.
I'm amazed the backers are on board. I wouldn't be. I'd rather invest in dead tech like coal, and soak every last drop of profit, than back this kind of bogus shit which is proving both more expensive, and less workable. Well, maybe not coal, but for goodnes sake, can we cut to the chase where AI investment tanks and move on with our lives?
- We're getting closer to the bubble-bursting peak. Yet another tech corp that fired a ton of experienced people hoping to squeeze more $ for a quarter, finding out AI hype is not all it's cracked up to be. Loving that for them.
Second thought, I wonder if zuckburger has turned into the Cramer of tech. First, the metaverse fiasco, now another massive overinvestment into a dead-ish end?
by sheeshkebab
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
by throwatdem12311
1 subcomments
- Why don’t they just got Claude Fable to do it for them? Are they stupid?
- "I was hoping AI had progressed enough so I could fire you. But you failed to make it so. Therefore, you're fired!"
- Since when Zuckerberg is an AI expert?
- > 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.
by sellmesoap
0 subcomment
- Ahh the classic bootlicker's bias, this is how oppressed developers move and click their sad cursor hoping to keep their job while they train their AI replacement!
>"For people who are comfortable, that's great, they can contribute to this kind of great human survey. To people who are not, it is not an issue,"
by AnotherGoodName
0 subcomment
- I'm guessing this is specifically about Avocado which everyone at Meta would acknowledge is terrible.
- 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.
by dude250711
1 subcomments
- Who is the genius who told him development will get faster?
The man can't catch a break!
- Isn't he just trying to tank competitors prices? Try to burst the bubble in a race he is way behind?
- AI agents are no good.
by Scroll_Swe
0 subcomment
- Echoes the same as when AWS would mean no need for IT anymore. Is there less? Yes. Gone? No.
- 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.
- Maybe they'd make faster progress if they worked in the Metaverse.
- 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?
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Related:
Meta’s chaotic AI strategy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461
by bravetraveler
0 subcomment
- Want with one hand, shit in the other. Which fills first?
- 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.
by threethirtytwo
3 subcomments
- why havent big tech employees formed a union?
- Did he announce it in the metaverse? Bro is never right.
by diogenescynic
0 subcomment
- Facebook is already renting out their excess GPU capacity. Nvidia is giving out GPU capacity for investment stakes in startups. OpenAI is trying to get the government to take a 5% stake and needs to make the same amount of revenue within 3 years as Google does now or else they're going to default on their payments to Oracle. It may not be the same as the 'dark fiber' from the Dot-com bubble but it sure seems similar. Especially when this hardware is purchased ahead of delivery and ages so quickly it's not even clear it will be reusable after a few years. It's the scale of the investment in this stuff that is the issue. In 3 years, AI spending is off the charts compared to the railway bubble, Dot-com bubble, Roaring 20s, or really any other bubble. I don't think it's going to end well.
- 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 hamfisted
Examples abound of "I reported Nazi hate page. Didn't violate community guidelines. I called my friend a jerk, jokingly, got a month ban
For 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)
by penpendian
1 subcomments
- i bet he wants some calculative shit
by yanhangyhy
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- i blame Wang!
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- 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
- 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.
by liuchao-001
0 subcomment
- Actually, agents have been developing incredibly fast. It is just that Zuckerberg has some unrealistic expectations; the man is a lunatic.
Over the past six months or so, OpenAI's internal team has completely shifted from being heavy ChatGPT users to using Codex. Once you start using an agent like Codex, it is very hard to go back.This shift is truly transformative.
I am also aware that some of the consumer agent products on the market are growing very rapidly, such as Manus and GenSpark. Not to mention Claude Code and Codex.
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