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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

161–170 of 604 posts

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#161
post #131
post #113

As 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 Engine…

While you sound reasonable, I can't tell the difference between an honest opinion and a sales pitch here.

I am making a sales pitch on behalf of all the projects I mentioned (not just the one I'm involved with).

I see LLMs failing at coding daily (one of the "perks" of working in the space), and I'm incredibly bullish on this approach.

And I don't think it'll replace humans or junior engineers. As programmers, we've been "replacing" ourselves since the days of assembler that replaced direct machine coding. This is just another iteration of it.

(if you do want a sales pitch, here's one: https://twitter.com/senkorasic/status/1765769482985722267 )

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#162
post #73

As 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…

I build a pretty popular LLM tool. I think learning when/how to use them is as big a mental hurdle as it was learning to google well or whether something is googlable or not. In the realm of coding here are a few things its really good at: - Translating code, generating cross language clients. I'll feed it a golang single file API backend and tell it to generate the typescript client for that. You can add hints like…

>- Small module completion. I write an interface of a class/struct with it's methods and some comments and tell it to fill in. A recent one I did looked something like (abbreviated):

Are they considerably better than existing non-AI tools + manual coding for this? In VSCode and Visual Studio, when working with an interface in C# for example, I can click two context menus to have it generate an implementation with constructors, getters, & setters included, leaving only the business logic code to write manually. You've mention you have to describe to the AI in comments, and then I assume spend time on a step to verify the AI has correctly interpreted your request & implemented.

I can definitely see the advantage for LLMs when writing unit tests on existing code, but short of very limited situations, I'm really finding it difficult to find the 55% efficiency improvements claimed by the likes of GitHub's AI Copilot.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#163
post #73

As 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…

lol I was on the same boat until I sinked it all together. I ended up wasting more time arguing with the LLM chat than doing anything remotely useful. I just use it for reference now, and even that I am not 1000% sure.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#164

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 you are so sure this is happening you can just buy some stock or calls on these AI companies and you will become a millionaire, no need to worry about your job.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#165
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this of course conflats two entirely different things. 1) technology development has tended to hugely improve society-wide productivity and be a general (though not unmitigated) good. 2) technology development has been absolutely shit for many individuals as their careers disappear. people should be way more worried about good national governance and safety nets to deal with the terrible consequences of 2 while we re…

Too many people using the safety nets will cause them to collapse.

lol.

hopefully whoever is in charge of your country has put a lot more thought into the future of work as automation comes for white collar workers.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#166
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In terms of my "off ramp"?

I have a multi-part plan. Immediately, i'm working to get closer to the business. To be closer to the position of defining requirements, not implementing requirements.

Secondary, i'm experimenting with ideas I hope can become a business.

as a final fallback, I have a hobby woodshop in my basement, and I love making furniture.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#167

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…

> What will be left? Where will we be? Just stranded without dignity or purpose, left to rot when we no longer produce value.

Nobody stops you from paying $1000 for a shirt made by artisans right now. Do you want to?

> Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity.

It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely a win for society (in the longer term), but in the meantime a lot of people's lives were upended, devasted, and even ended due to the upheavel. Maybe we can avoid that this time, but I doubt it. You can't tell someone who's children are starving that it's all worth it.

[flagged]

If only I lived in the Bay Area. Or California. Or North America.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#169
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

Keep posting about this. I feel the same way.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#170

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…

This seems like it's something replit is better suited to execute. You will need human intervention at some point and at that point you're building a full-fledged web IDE
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