sorry, but no automated bullshit machine is going to do my job.
Devin: AI Software Engineer
111–120 of 604 posts
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#112As 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…
Ditto. I started out excited about LLMs and eager to use them everywhere, but have become steadily disillusioned as I have tried to apply them to daily tasks, and seen others try and fail in the same way.
Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do.
For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#113As someone who works in this space (https://pythagora.ai), I welcome new entrants to this niche.
Currently, mainstream AI usage in coding is at the level of assistants and glorified autocomplete. Which is great (I use GitHub Copilot daily), but for us working in the space it's obvious that the impact will be much larger. Besides us (Pythagora), there's also Sweep (mentioned by others in the comments) and GPT Engineer who are tackling the same problem, I believe each with a slightly different angle.
Our thesis is that human in the loop is key. In coding, you can think of LLMs as a very eager junior developer who can easily read StackOverflow but doesn't really think twice before jumping to implementation. With guidance (a LOT in terms of internal prompts, and some by human) it can achieve spectacular results.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe the best engineers will be able to shine since they have the best ai management ability with the coding knowledge. Let’s give all the shovelers spoons and live in the past where we can ignore the benefits technology can bring because we’re so afraid of what it means about the way we run society.
> Or maybe the best engineers will be able to shine since they have the best ai management ability with the coding knowledge. Considering we haven't seen talent rise to management, I'm not sure what makes you think that management will improve now.
Because the human talent will not have many alternatives left in this scenario. So far they could stay in the technical lane, now they will be forced into AI-management.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#115There 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).
Art as a concept is basically meaningless these days.
What is art? Apparently, anything can be art, so what's the difference between art and not_art?
From my personal experience, it is used more as a shitty excuse for substandard/lame/overpriced stuff to exist. And to boost it's creator's ego.
AI certainly isn't really doing it, just as people aren't.
Fuck art.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#116People who try to draw historical analogies to AI replacing humans say things like:
"cars replaced horse drawn carriages. But we managed to adapt to that, the carriage drivers got new jobs."
My dudes. We are the HORSES being replaced in this scenario.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#117Earlier 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. 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.
The "some work" phrase is doing a lot of work for you here. It can easily take them 100 years as well and they will get broke long before.
I see nothing in the original article that doesn't strike me as the techno-optimism of the 1960s where people made movies and books saying "It's the year 2003 and the humanity is exploring the vast depths of the Universe".
So again, it's a very plain old boring techno-optimism.
I am sure they can automate some work (like scaffold a certain CRUD part of the app) but there are always nuances and specifics and the current generation AI has so far proven inadequate in catching those and taking proper care of them.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#118Earlier 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…
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 totall…
While it certainly make you, the individual, less productive because you've been replaced by a machine, it still makes society more productive.
If replaced, you essentially were the misallocated capital: capital paying your salary was inefficient compared to that same salary paying a more productive AI.
This means you will either have to find a way to become more efficient to compete against AI for developer jobs, or you will have to reskill. This reskilling period is what you're referring to as being less productive, but in the long run you will find a job and therefore will become productive again. We can't guarantee that job will pay as much as your former, but costs in the former greatly fell anyway, so it doesn't much matter.
In short: you will be reallocated and find your optimal productivity subject to your utility preferences through the reallocation.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#119There 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.
The difference with self-driving cars hype is that they need to be 99.999% good so pretty much perfect to be useful on road and be incorporated mainstream. AI doing some tasks 90% as good as human is good enough. Self driving cars got massively improved in the last 15 years. I remember 15 years ago when DARPA were doing their first self driving challenge and the current tech we have is like magic comparing to what we had back then.
Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer
#120There 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…
The next wave of AI will just take one high-level goal, and prompt you to reduce ambiguity. You’re already seeing it with this Devin thing, but it’ll get way more effective.