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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#4
post #2

Given the excitement on X right now about this, I don't understand how this is not in the front page already :)

There's another post both are not really getting attention.

I really wanted to see what hacker news had to say on this :(

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#6
I mean, this might just be existential cope, but my first thought when looking at the Upwork demo posted on Twitter (https://x.com/cognition_labs/status/1767548768734294113?s=20) was that it seemed a little bit suspicious.

Namely, the client was asking for an unusually specific (for Upwork) ask. It was an almost perfect example of a job to be given to an AI agent for testing purposes.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#8
There is no way this is going to make it so that "engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals."

Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings.

I guess this is the future. We've coded ourselves out of a job. People are smiling and celebrating this all - personally I find it kinda sad that we've basically put an end to software engineering as a career and put loads of people out of work. it is not just SWEs - it is impacting a lot of careers... I hope these researchers can sleep well at night because they're dooming huge swathes of people to unemployment.

Are we about to enter a software engineering winter? People will find new careers, no kids will learn to code since AI can do it all. We'll end up with a load of AI researchers being "the new SWEs", but relying on AI to implement everything? Maybe that will work and we'll have a virtuous circle of AIs making AI improvements and we'll never need engineers again? Or maybe we'll hit a wall and progress in comp sci will essentially stop?

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