Andrew Ng: "In 3-6 months, everyone will be using self-improving loops. No more prompting”

Andrew Ng recently said: "100% of my tasks are now done by AI agents. Hype has exceeded my expectations. Loops is next step. In 3-6 months, everyone will be using self-improving loops. No more prompting."

I think he's not too far off, you can already see the shift happening, people are moving away from chatting with an AI and telling it what to do step by step, and building systems where the agent just keeps working on a task on its own, which is kind of the whole point of calling it an agent.

Sounds great on paper but there's a few practical problems nobody really talks about.
The first one is cost: when an agent gets stuck it can spin in circles for way longer than you'd expect and what would've taken a few messages in a normal chat turns into a lot of wasted time and money

Second is data quality: agents work way better when what you feed them is clean and easy to parse, if they're pulling raw docs, they end up burning time just sorting through the noise instead of doing the task.
That's why a lot of devs spend half a day prepping data as they do building the agent itself.

Third thing, and probably the most underrated, is that these setups are a lot easier to run when someone else is footing the bill.
A big company can eat the cost of an agent messing up and burning tokens, a small startup can't afford that kind of slack.
My take is we'll see a lot more autonomous agents over the next year, but the real question is whether people can make them reliable and cheap enough to actually run every day