This awesome. Until Devin steals your startup idea.
Software is a commodity, find something more valuable to differentiate your startup.
just need to get an A list celeb like ryan reynolds involved and people will follow
Devin: AI Software Engineer
71–80 of 604 posts
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#72Technological unemployment and doomerism aside, I think there's a big difference here - in the past, you've needed lots of capital to invest in those labour-saving devices. A farm labourer couldn't buy a tractor, a dockerworker can't buy a crane.
But a software engineer absolutely can buy access to AI services.
I have no idea how this will end up, but it'll be different to before.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#73As a developer but also product person, I keep trying to use AI to code for me. I keep failing, because of context length, because of shit output from the model, because of lack of any kind of architecture etc etc etc. I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful, more than helping me with leetcode.
Just yesterday I tried to feed it a simple HTML page to extract a selector, I tried it with GPT-4-turbo, I tried it with Claude, I tried it with Groq, I tried it with a local LLama2 model with 128k context window. None of them worked. This is a task that while annoying, I do in about 10 seconds.
Sure, I'm open to the possibility that in the next 2 - 3 days up to a couple of years, I'll no longer do manual coding. But honestly. After so much hype, I'm starting to grow a bit irritated with the hype.
Just give me a product that works as advertised and I'll throw money your way because I have a lot more ideas than I have code throughoutput!
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#74There 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…
Call me fool but s this hype reminds me the hype about self-driving cars coming in a year back in 2014.
AI engineers are coming, but I think we would have long retired before they reach a point where they can replace us.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#75There 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…
> 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. We continually hear anxiety about technology leading to mass unemployment and it keeps not happening. Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Technological advancements transformed agriculture from being…
> Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages.
Wages have not kept up with productivity.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#76Although 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 se…
Ah yes, you've entered the first stage of grief. Denial. Next you'll start bargaining, you'll get angry, and you'll become depressed, eventually you'll just accept that AI is taking over software. In my mind, I've concluded that I have less than 3 years to find an off ramp.
What kind of work do you have in mind?
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#77There 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…
> 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. We continually hear anxiety about technology leading to mass unemployment and it keeps not happening. Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Technological advancements transformed agriculture from being…
You've got a good point here. I've wondered about this at times. Like, what if we can't find a way to advance these agents much beyond where Devin is now? What if they can't consume a code base and make meaningfully high quality additions to them reliably, so they're essentially stuck as novice/intermediate developers?
This seems nice(ish) for someone like me with a senior title and experience (~15 years), but totally knocks the bottom out of the industry. How do new people enter the industry and become programmers like I did? What's the new entry point into software, and what does that role look like?
I can't tell if it would actually be good to knock the bottom out. If seniors become sort of like engineers going into the machine to tune things and build the big new things, who replaces them eventually? Will software get worse because of this?
One thing I wonder is if this will birth a new generation of software architecture which is essentially a complete mess which AIs can easily and efficiently manage due to being machines, which will require businesses to "take the leap". Basically you tell the system what you want and it'll generate it on a bespoke system using custom infrastructure which the AI is optimized to implement solutions on. The results might be amazing, but if something goes wrong, humans would have a hell of a time figuring it out. That wouldn't be a nice career for someone like me. It might still leave a category of old fashioned human-engineered software, though.
One thing about agriculture worth noting is that we had a LOT of other things we could work on. Agriculture held us back, so to speak. What is software holding back right now? If I'm unemployed by this advance, what would I do instead? I'm not sure how transferable my skills are. It could actually make me quite a bit less productive, not more.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#78There 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…
>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.
This is the same logic that has driven cheap off-shoring in non-technical companies.
For decades orgs have been able to buy "human-level" (i.e. humans) engineering for a tiny fraction of an engineer's salary, and there have been millions of eager salesmen for off-shore dev shops pushing them to do it too. After seeing the outcomes of this approach, I understand why well-paid engineers remain well paid. And why they'll remain well-paid after the LLM non-pocalypse.
If you think LLMs are so amazing, I would encourage you to see how much you can rely on them to replace human beings in real world scenarios. Not in contrived PR pieces and cherry picked examples but in situations where actual real people would otherwise be working together to deliver commercially valuable outcomes.
You believe you have domain specific insights that allow you to state, with confidence, that LLMs are able to replace a highly technical and well-compensated role at virtually no cost. If that's the case, you're sitting on a gold mine. If I believed that, I'd be starting a development agency tomorrow.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#79There 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…
> 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. We continually hear anxiety about technology leading to mass unemployment and it keeps not happening. Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Technological advancements transformed agriculture from being…
Both things can be true.
In the short to medium term a bunch of people will be out of a job/career.
In the long term society may benefit overall.
On the other hand I’m not convinced humans are evolving fast enough to keep up with modern society. There are increasing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc, especially in young people. https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/for-80-years-young-americans-...
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
If AI can't make AI improvements that humans can, then it shouldn't be considered a very capable coder.
How many coders do you know that can make AI improvements? That ability is already reserved for the top humans. AI doesn’t even need to reach this bar to be better than the average coder.
I don't really think it is the "top humans" who are doing AI, it is just people whose skillsets and interests mesh with what is used in AI now. I will say that I am doing AI work and I am certainly not a top human when it comes to intellect.