Live data from Hacker News

Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

101–110 of 604 posts

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#101

Humans seek work that provides satisfaction and meaning in their life. For every technological advancement, artisans are the first to be made obsolete. Sure we have landfills full of unworn textiles, the market says its good, but overall, we keep destroying what allows humans to seek meaning. Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity. We have outsourced art…

If we got universal basic income, people could do whatever they want. I for one would be content spending my time gardening and trekking in the nature. I despise office work and do it only for money. It's forcing the rich to give us UBI that is the problem.

Sure but UBI would never afford a garden.

It would be bare minimum to survive, if that. We'd need a complete restructuring of society to even approach dignity via UBI.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Failing to meet investors hype would be the biggest reason in my book.

Also it seems like training and running these systems is incredibly costly and the prices AI companies charge for their products are being subsidized by investor money, which won't last forever.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#103

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…

The key phrase is "over the last 200 years". 200 years ago there was just 1 billion people. People had decade(s) to reskill to new profession. Their offspring picked different profession if their parents didn't have good prospect. Changing profession was also not requiring half a decade learning.

Now imagine that AI will make 20% people redundant over next 5 years - thats ~1.6 billion people.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#104

This is where inference speed starts to matter. H100 might be cheaper per inference than Groq but cutting down the wait time from 1 minute to 10 seconds could be a big deal.

Have you tried Groq? We did a few days testing on replacing gpt4-turbo with it and, while incredibly fast, the results were horrible, even after a lot of specific prompt engineering. So many hallucinations and such. Our products all have to do with strict generation and software quality; it basically has to fill in the blanks but it was incredibly hit or miss. Some results came in within a second so even a few iterat…

they just run other open models, so you're complaint isn't about Groq, it's about GPT-4 vs mixtral 8x7b accelerated

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#105

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…

> 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.

It's important to remember that the reason AI can do it at all is that millions of software engineers wrote decent/good code and made it available on the internet. The reason it's going to be a winter is that going forward, there's going to be a huge reluctance to share code by people.

And that AI will never write code better than humans. It will write it 90% as well, still requiring a human to fix the last 10%.

It will further create a bimodal distribution of wages in the software industry. Those who know how to clean up the last 10%, and those who don't (AI prompt monkeys). The rift between these 2 categories will keep widening.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#106

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. 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 ea…

  "If I believed that, I'd be starting a development agency tomorrow."

The company making Devin is doing just that. As we can see, it will take some work to perfect.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Groq? We did a few days testing on replacing gpt4-turbo with it and, while incredibly fast, the results were horrible, even after a lot of specific prompt engineering. So many hallucinations and such. Our products all have to do with strict generation and software quality; it basically has to fill in the blanks but it was incredibly hit or miss. Some results came in within a second so even a few iterat…

they just run other open models, so you're complaint isn't about Groq, it's about GPT-4 vs mixtral 8x7b accelerated

Sure, so when openai moves to groq it might be something. Groq with the current models is impressive but doesn’t work for us is what I am saying. As I don’t actually have access to other models on groq, this is groq as it stands.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#108
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whil…

eventually we will reach the limits of what can be discovered with physics. the same applies here. eventually the limit of what a human can improve on through a job will be done. is this that point? idk but there will be one time that "new jobs" arent made

Your reference would only be true if we could actually catalog, index, reference, retain, and absorb all there is to know about the physical world into a model so simple we can still comrehend it. That's... unlikely.

More likely is that progress, discovery, and improvement behave more like dispersing bits of fog in an intractably large cloud that's always creeping back in on the clearings your made previously. You can sustain positive progress but its asymptotic at best and there are always regressions eating away at what you've done in the past.

So don't worry, there's always going to be more kinds of work to do, just like there's always going to be more physics to study.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#109

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…

[flagged]

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#110
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if we can redistribute the AI-generated surplus, this will still be a net-win for us all. We can't.

Like, due to lack of political willpower? Or do you see some fundamental limitation of, say, an automation tax?

Yes, the complete impotency of anti-trust and big business regulation over the last 50-60 years.

And any political willpower that exists is constantly used for smearing campaigns for either side of the political spectrum (e.g. look at them, they are the bad guys).

Automation tax is also the worst possible outcome, since it both stifles innovation AND doesn't address the redistribution problem.

Post reply on HN