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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#81

Post by Retric »

andrewmutz wrote: post #36
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…

> 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…

Not all jobs are the same. The Real Median US income in 2019 was 78,250$/year in 2022 it had fallen to 74,580. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

The only way that happens is if millions of people are significantly worse off. Most people can find work in the big economy, that doesn’t mean replacing a 100k/year job with a 25k/year job is equivalent.

Across a long enough time horizon technology tends to make most people better off, but in the short term it can seriously fuck people over.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#82

Post by steve_adams_86 »

raytopia wrote: post #54
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 don't think it's the end of software work yet. A lot of these AI companies are promising the world and of course no one can deliver on that. I think it's more likely we'll enter another AI winter first after all these impressive party tricks get boring and investors realize that just because a product uses AI doesn't mean it provides any value.

What do you expect would cause the next winter? Or in other words, what capabilities of AI in this context do you expect will stall next?

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#84

Post by dw_arthur »

andrewmutz wrote: post #36
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…

> 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…

Things could be different this time. We've pretty much automated our physical labor, what happens when you automate general thinking? Any new job or field will also be able to be done by AI.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#85

Post by xena »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #75
andrewmutz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's one notable exception! Tech work in the Silicon Valley area. All other jobs should be paid like that to keep up with productivity and inflation since the 70's.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#86

Post by observationist »

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…

Software engineering still needs a human in the loop, just like art still needs to be prompted and tweaked by a human that can do composition, or writing that needs to be edited and refined, and so on.

AI can't do 100% of the jobs, but it seems like we're somewhere past the 100x capabilities point. AI should be able to make a good employee able to do 100x the output at the same level of quality, and AI only gets more efficient and capable from here on out.

Lawyers doing highly specialized work like doc review can use million token context lengths to achieve days or weeks of work in minutes or hours. Doctors can review huge quantities of literature in search of information relevant to their patients, maximizing the value of their time. Any knowledge work, anything that has repeatable processes, anything not requiring physical work in the real world, will be subject to increasing, accelerating, and unstoppable automation. Market forces will reward efficiency, and eliminating human overhead with relative cost reductions approaching 99.99% is a victory for companies nimble enough to pull it off.

We're living in the apocryphal interesting times.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#87

Post by steve_adams_86 »

swalsh wrote: post #41
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #15

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 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.

No, I'm past the denial stage (I was certainly there, though... GPT threw me hard and I spent a good 2 months processing what was happening) but I don't, in this specific case, see this agent displacing many jobs yet. Well, not my kind of jobs. I'm already very worried for the entry level of our industry... I'm not sure what it means yet, but I don't think we will have many entrants into software careers within 5 years or so.

I'm looking for an offramp as well. I truly love software so it's a hard reality to contend with at times. Regardless, I'm not a software engineer at my core. I'm a problem solver, and I love creating things. This is transferable. I'm not sure where to yet, but I'm certainly capable of making a move. I hope I have more than 3 years, though.

As someone else asked, I'm curious where you're headed or thinking of heading so far.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#88

Post by nsypteras »

Clearly an extremely impressive demo and congrats on the launch. I do wonder how often the bugs Devin encounters will be solvable from the simple fixes that were demonstrated. For instance, I notice in the first demo Devin hits a KeyError and decides to resolve it by wrapping the code in a try-catch. While this will get the code to run, I immediately imagined cases where it's not actually an ideal solution (maybe it's a KeyError because the blog post Devin read is incorrect or out of date and Devin should actually be referencing a different key altogether or a different API). Can Devin "back up" at this point and implement a fix further back in its "decision tree" (e.g. use a different API endpoint) or can it only come up with fixes for the specific problem it's encountering at this moment (catch the KeyError and return None)?

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#89

Post by HanClinto »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #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.

I tend to agree.

I really want to see what this does with an open-source backlog. The more mundane (yet critical) of a project, the better.

What would be good projects to feed it? I suggested Mozilla and llama.cpp, but there's got to be something better as a use-case for it.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#90

Post by pzo »

swalsh wrote: post #41
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #15

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 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.

one year ago I was thinking about ~10 years and at least safe 5 years. Considering how it's all progressing right now and we had chatGPT just 15 months ago I think you might be right or salaries will get reduced significantly.
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