Devin: AI Software Engineer

Consider how you can't really get by in most of America without a car because we designed our cities to require them. It would be a mistake to conclude that, because life is harder in a car-optimized society without a car, society must be better off optimizing for cars.

https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/income

- deobfuscate complex requirements into well divided chunks

- find gaps or holes in requirements so that I have to write the minimal amount of code

- understand codebases so that the implementation fits nicely

I don't need an "AI software engineer", I need an "AI people person who gives me well defined tasks". Now sure, if you combine those two kinds of AIs I could perhaps become irrelevant.

1) copilot is a terrific auto complete, and writes tremendous amounts of repetitive boilerplate

2) copilot can help me kickstart writing some complex functions starting from a comment where I tell it what is the input and expected output. Is the implementation always perfect or bug free? No. But in general I just need to review and check rather than come up with the instruction entirely.

3) copilot chat helps me a lot in those situations where I would've googled to find how to do this or that and spent a lot of time with irrelevant or outdated search results

4) I have found use cases for LLMs in production. I had lots of unformatted plain text that I wanted to transform in markdown. All I needed to do is to provide few examples and it did everything on its own. No need to implement complex parsers, but make a query to OpenAI with the prompt and context. Few euros per month in OpenAI credits is still insanely cheaper than paying tons of money in writing and maintaining software by humans for that use case.

5) It helps me tremendously when trying to learn new programming languages or remembering some APIs. Writing CSS selectors is actually a very good example. But I don't feed it an entire HTML as you do, I literally tell him "how do I target the odd numbered list elements that are descendants of .foo-bar for this specific media query". Not sure why would you need to feed it an entire HTML.

6) LLMs have been extremely useful to generate images and icons for an entire frontend application I wrote

7) I instruct him to write and think about test cases about my code. And it does and writes the code and tests. Often thinks about test cases I would've never thought of and catches nice bugs.

I really don't buy nor think it can write too much on its own.

The promise of it writing anything but simple boilerplate, I find it ridiculous because there's way too much nuance in our products, business, devices, systems that you need to follow and work on.

But as a helper? It's terrific.

I'm 100% sure that people not using these tools are effectively limiting themselves and their productivity.

It's like arguing you're better off writing code without a type checker or without intellisense.

Sure you can do it, but you're gonna be less effective.

I'm not saying that things were sunshine and rainbows pre-industrialization, but there's some level of analysis to be done on the durability and value of a handcrafted piece of clothing, the care that goes into maintaining it, the value of a local economy, and the other side where you're forced to buy cheap items that degrade at a far faster rate.

If a town's local businesses are put out by a new walmart's ability to carry low prices, does the town truly come out ahead with those low prices? Or does Walmart simply extract more money from the town than it returns, leaving the town worse off?