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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#341

Post by rewgs »

pdimitar wrote: post #125
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…

You are vastly overselling current generation AI here. It can do some things -- GitHub Copilot has been useful for people to reduce the boilerplate generation, for example -- but in terms of actual programming which 98% of the time is maintenance (fixing bugs, debugging, adding tests, refactoring, adding features) it's performing mostly bad. It's only good at generating code and maybe "understanding" some of it. Prov…

Fair, but:

Whether or not the tech can actually live up to the hype doesn't mean execs/VCs/etc won't try to get there anyway. That will, at best, result in a ton of volatility, as those trying to utilize AI figure out that it actually can't do what they want, and then have to hire engineers again, etc...

I don't know. Who knows where this is heading.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#342

Post by LZ_Khan »

Hey! Stop taking our jobs!

Side note: I'm kind of offended that something called 'Devin' is going to take my job. If you're going to replace me at least let me keep my dignity by naming it something cool like 'Sora'

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#343

Post by ThalesX »

mediaman wrote: post #333
ThalesX wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with this entire space is that we have VC hype for work that should ultimately still be being done in research labs. I also have two crypto-bro friends that are hyping it up without having anything to show for it. Which is why I'm sort of complaining about they hype surrounding it. I agree with your post to a large extent. This is not production ready technology. Maybe tomorrow.

LLMs are quite good at text based tasks such as summarization and extracting entities. These generally don't require advanced logic or thought, though they can require some moderate reasoning ability to summarize two slightly conflicting text extracts. Lots of corporate work would be enhanced by better summarization, better information dissemination, and better text extraction. Most of it is pretty boring work, but t…

Summarize this for me please: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-...

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#344

Post by rewgs »

RyEgswuCsn wrote: post #279

If you need AI to help you program an algorithm, then you shouldn't be using it because you can't tell if AI's solution is correct. If you can tell if a solution is correct or not --- well, then you don't need to have AI write it for you. I think AI programming can only work when the industry begin to treat "almost working" systems backed by human customer service as acceptable.

This. And at a certain point, a prompt might become so specific that you might as well just write the code yourself. After all, a prompt is instructions for a computer, as is code.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#345

Post by mypalmike »

huimang wrote: post #210
sesm wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ChatGPT every day and it’s excellent at: - replacing StackOverflow and library documentation - library search - converting between formats and languages - explaining existing code/queries - deobfuscating code - explaining concepts (kinda hit or miss) - helping you get unstuck when debugging or looking for solution (‘give me possible reasons for …’) I feel like many of this things require asking the right questi…

I like it for condensing long stack traces and very very simple requests, but it really falters when you try to do anything domain specific. Library documentation? Yeah, it doesn't really save time when GPT makes up functions and libraries, making me check the docs anyways... I was initially hopeful but I find it gets in my way for anything not trivial.

I find it to be hit or miss in this aspect. Sometimes I can write a comment about how I want to use an API that I don't know well, and it generates perfect, idiomatic code to do exactly what I want. I quickly wrote a couple of Mastodon bots in golang, leaning heavily on Copilot due to my lack of familiarity with both the language and Mastodon APIs. But yes, sonetimes it just spits out imaginary garbage. Overall it's a win for my productivity - the failures are fast and obvious and just result in my doing things the old way.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#346

Post by Buttons840 »

devinegan wrote: post #192

Have I been replaced? AI coming for my job and now my name!

Me too, let's find an Alexa support group or something.

I always had some sympathy for people whose name becomes a product, but it was surreal to see the headline and realize it had happened to me.

At least I'm not named Karen. I'll think twice about how I use people's names in the future.

Maybe a silver lining is my name was attached to a clean and upstanding product. For the rest of you, maybe your name will be associated with the hottest new erotic fiction AI sometime soon.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#347

Post by CamperBob2 »

huimang wrote: post #210
sesm wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ChatGPT every day and it’s excellent at: - replacing StackOverflow and library documentation - library search - converting between formats and languages - explaining existing code/queries - deobfuscating code - explaining concepts (kinda hit or miss) - helping you get unstuck when debugging or looking for solution (‘give me possible reasons for …’) I feel like many of this things require asking the right questi…

I like it for condensing long stack traces and very very simple requests, but it really falters when you try to do anything domain specific. Library documentation? Yeah, it doesn't really save time when GPT makes up functions and libraries, making me check the docs anyways... I was initially hopeful but I find it gets in my way for anything not trivial.

Yeah, it doesn't really save time when GPT makes up functions and libraries, making me check the docs anyways...

That behavior is now vanishingly-rare, at least in GPT4.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#348

Post by ecoquant »

narrator wrote: post #323
ThalesX wrote: 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…

As a developer who is good at object oriented design, architecture, and sucks at leetcode stuff, I have been able to use it to make myself probably twice as productive as I otherwise would be. I just have a conversation with GPT-4 when it doesn't do what I want. "Could you make that object oriented?" "Could you do that for this API instead, here let me paste the docs in for you." I think people want it to completely…

Totally agree. I am not a professional developer. I find programming to be quite dull and uninteresting.

I am going to work on something after this pot of coffee brews that I simply could not produce without chatGPT4. The ideas will be mine but the most of the code will be from chatGPT.

What is obvious is different skill sets are helped more than others with the addition of these tools.

I would even say it is all there in the language we use. If we are passing out "artificial intelligence" to people, the people who already have quite a bit of intelligence will be helped far less than those lacking in intelligence. Then combine that with the asymmetry of domains this artificial intelligence will help in.

It should be no surprise we see hugely varied opinions on its usefulness.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#349

Post by CamperBob2 »

jonny_eh wrote: post #149
parhamn wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Translating code, generating cross language clients Can any convert a native iPhone app to an Android one?

Piece by piece, sure. The context window is too small to just feed it a massive source dump all at once.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#350

Post by xcv123 »

notpachet wrote: post #329
kjqgqkejbfefn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Jesus Christ, that's horrible. It's something a clever fourth-grader would write. > my first stint with a hard-on over a clever metaphor That's all it is.

> It's something a clever fourth-grader would write.

This level of cope and denial is amazing to witness.

The most powerful (multi trillion dollar) companies on the planet are pouring practically infinite resources into developing systems that will ultimately make you redundant.

An early version of AGI is staring you in the face while you call it a "fourth-grader". It won't stay in fourth grade forever.

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