Devin, the world’s first AI software engineer, built by Cognition Labs, has taken the internet by storm. Backed by $21 million in funding from investors, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the company is already grabbing attention for its AI assistant, Devin – godlike in English – who can handle entire software projects end-to-end.
While AI-assisted coding tools like GitHub Copilot have gained popularity, Devin stands out with its promise of completing full development projects independently. If successful, this could significantly impact the software development industry, potentially reducing the need for human developers on certain projects.
It also achieved 13.86% accuracy on the SWE-Bench benchmark that evaluates AI models on software engineering tasks. Resolving nearly 14 out of every 100 issues independently it far exceeds previous best model Claude 2’s 1.96% unassisted and 4.80% assisted accuracy. This advancement marks notable progress in AI’s capability to autonomously understand and address software development issues, enhancing its potential to support developers.
“Devin feels UI/UX first, not GenAI first,” said Andrew Kean Gao, an avid developer who got early access to play around with the world’s first AI software engineer. He said that AI is a core component, but it’s the surrounding infra they built that is the star of the show.
He said that the product feels quite finished, and this is not a demo. “They have things built out such as auto deploy to netlify, api key protection, intelligent way to interrupt without interrupting, a good UI that is *tailored to humans* and bridges LLM and human dev, the slider to move backwards in time,” he added, saying that it was fun to watch things unfold.
“The Biggest negative is the slowness,” said Gao, describing the site as feeling a bit slow. However, he said that might also be because of the 1 MBPS Starlink connection. So that part is probably me.
He also said that you can not edit the code. “Not collaborative yet.”
Ryan Carniato, the author of the SolidJS UI library and MarkoJS Core Team Member, said that so far, Devin struggles to choose the right libraries for simple tasks like building a to-do list app. He questioned this choice of complex libraries instead of alternatives like Lit, a modern, lightweight library for building web components.
“90% of my job is not to write code (as a senior software engineer), is to: deobfuscate complex requirements into well-divided chunks, find gaps or holes in requirements so that I have to write the minimal amount of code, understand codebases so that the implementation fits nicely,” said a user who goes by the name dakiol on HackerNews, highlighting the flaws of Devin.
Is Devin coming for your jobs?
This impressive jump in capabilities has sparked a debate on social media about the future of programming jobs and the role of AI in software development. While some developers expressed concerns about job displacement, others view Devin as a tool to enhance productivity and focus on higher-level tasks.
Surprisingly, the overall outlook for developer jobs remains positive. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment of software developers will grow 22% from 2019 to 2029, much faster than the average for all occupations.
“The biggest good news is for non-technical entrepreneurs. AI systems like Devin will reduce the barrier to entry for non-technical founders to enter the technical space. It will democratise software engineering,” said AI scientist Saurabh Shukla, highlighting the positive side of Devin, and how it will (not) replace software engineering jobs.
“Yes, if you are someone who *just* writes code, you need to start thinking differently,” said Vineet Joglekar, engineering manager at Google, saying that Devin isn’t poised to replace all developer jobs yet, due to the ongoing need for manual oversight in troubleshooting, strategic thinking, and human-driven innovative problem-solving.
