Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Li: AI coding agents still assume the current year is 2023

Yoko Li · Who's Coding Now? - AI and the Future of Software Development · May 16, 2025 · at 9:56

Yoko Li, partner at a16z Infra, discusses knowledge cutoff limitations in AI coding agents during a panel on software development workflows.

0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When you ask the coding agent, when do you think today is? It's always like, 20, 23. And then all the specs that we'll give you are from, like, 20, 24 at best, depending on when the knowledge cutoff is.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Yoko Li

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Li: Specialist AI startups will win over foundation model creators
“I actually think the winners will be the specialists, not the foundational models. It's the people who will build on top of the foundational models or fine tune the foundational models.”
Yoko Li May 2, 2025 ▶ 28:02 What Is an AI Agent?
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Li: AI slows net new human hiring rather than firing existing workers
“But we are seeing headcount growth in some areas are slowing. So it's not that existing jobs are being replaced. It's more like they're hiring net new. Humans slower.”
Yoko Li May 2, 2025 ▶ 11:19 What Is an AI Agent?
Assertion Partly supported
Li: Amazon Go relied on human data labelers despite automated computer vision claims
“There's an Amazon Go supermarket a while back in Soma. So like they, I think they were advertising that it's computer vision models behind the scenes. Identifying what you took from the supermarket. But then people found that they hire a lot of people behind t…”
Yoko Li May 2, 2025 ▶ 17:58 What Is an AI Agent?
Insight
Li: Coding excels in AI because software code is verifiable
“But I also think coding market is doing so well also because it's somewhat verifiable problem. Like you can verify like a coding function, like input and output are very clear compared to like user preference, you know and all the other problems.”
Yoko Li May 16, 2025 ▶ 3:08 Who's Coding Now? - AI and the Future of Software Development
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Li: Enterprise software developers will eventually adopt vibe coding
“So I can totally see enterprise users doing VIVE coding, and that's a compliment.”
Yoko Li May 16, 2025 ▶ 43:14 Who's Coding Now? - AI and the Future of Software Development
Insight
Li: AI agents are multi-step LLM chains with decision trees
“I actually feel like it's a multi-step LM chain with a decision tree.”
Yoko Li May 2, 2025 ▶ 9:06 What Is an AI Agent?
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.