Devin: AI Software Engineer • Hacker News Board

Although the demos are impressive, they seem short and limited in scope which makes me wonder how well this will work outside of these planned cases. Can it do software architecture at all? Is it still essentially just regurgitating solutions? How often will the solution only be 90% correct, which is 100% not good enough?

Even so, I realize the demos are still broad in scope and the results are incredible. Imagine seeing this even 2 years ago. It would seem like magic; you wouldn't be able to believe it. Today, this was inevitable and entirely believable. There will be even better versions of this soon.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#16

Post by optimalsolver » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #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 an…

>can focus on more interesting problems

Kind of like how art was supposed to be what humans would be doing while AI does the jobs we don't want, but looks like that will be the first thing to fall to the machines, while humans fight for carpet installation and plumbing jobs (for a while).

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#17

Post by siva7 » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:33 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #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 an…

I would have dismissed this thought a year ago but seeing how fast openai is moving, in 5 years those ai assistants will be what nowadays human junior/intermediate devs are.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#18

Post by readthenotes1 » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #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 an…

As we eat our own dog food, we get eaten by it...

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#19

Post by IncreasePosts » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:35 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #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 an…

If AI can't make AI improvements that humans can, then it shouldn't be considered a very capable coder.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#20

Post by swatcoder » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 4:35 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #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 an…

The printing press replaced the need for scribes but introduced the need for typesetters.

Talented scribes did cool things with illustrations and flourishes that were lost in the transition, but ultimately spent quite a lot of their time stroking the letter "e" or "i" or whatever.

Meanwhile, typesetters found themselves in a whole new creative domain which was a different one than the scribes had been working in while also being informed by it and related to it. With their different workflow and this different domain, they were able to innovate in many ways unique to typesetting but also in ways that would circulate back to calligraphers and other inheritors of the hand-crafted letterwork tradition.

I'm personally not sold that we're soon to see LLM-based code generators replace software engineers anyway, but things are not so black and white as you suggest even were that to happen.