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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

401–410 of 604 posts

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#401
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. If you were only using GPT 3.5 (free ChatGPT) then your opinion is irrelevant. With GPT-4 you could directly ask it: "rewrite your previous response so that it sounds less generic, less amateurish, and not written by a committee". I'm not even joking. Just provide enough information and tell it what to do. If you don't like the output…

Yes, I've used GPT-4. The writing sounds better, but it still sucks at writing. Most importantly, it feels like it sucks just as much as GPT-3.5 in some deeply important ways. If you use GPT-4 day-to-day, you've probably encountered this sense of a capability wall before. The point where additional prompting, tweaking, re-prompting simply doesn't seem to be yielding better results on the task, or it feels like the is…

I think it is a tooling issue. It is in no way obvious how use LLM's effectively, especially for really good writing results. Tweaking and tinkering can be time consuming indeed, but i use lately the chatgpt-shell [1] and it lends well to an iterative approach. One needs to cycle through some styles first, and then decide how to most effectively prompt for better results.

[1]https://github.com/xenodium/chatgpt-shell/blob/bf2d12ed2ed60...

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#402
post #367

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…

I have the same questions. I’ve decided the best thing I can do is vote with my wallet (i.e. as a consumer) and vote with my time (i.e. as a producer). Consume commodities that are regenerative and products that are durable. Whenever possible, buy local to keep cash flows (wealth transfer) local. Invest your time in contributing to products that encourage other people to do the same. Yvon Chouniard said (I’m complete…

Autarkies are impoverished, societies that trade freely are wealthy. Your economic impulses are deeply misguided. If everyone only bought local the world would be much poorer. It’s better (consumer choice, comparative advantage) to buy from the world and to let the world buy from you. The money doesn’t disappear when you spend it outside your locality, it flows both ways.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the 20/80 rule. They haven't even gotten to 15% yet. Our jobs are safe. I would even expect more "beginners" to try something with AI and then need an actual programmer to help them ( At least, if they are unwilling to invest the time in development and debugging themselves Ps. Probably all the given examples are in top 3 most popular programming languages.

Machines currently are at an amateur level, but amateurs across the board on the knowledge base. Amateurs at Python, Fortran, C, C++ and all programming languages. Amateurs at car engineering, airplane engineering, submarine engineering etc. Amateurs at human biology, animal biology, insect biology and so on. I don't know anyone who is an amateur at everything.

What does it mean exactly to be an amateur at "submarine engineering"? It certainly doesn't mean you know how to build a submarine.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you examples of how it helps me: 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 instruct…

I ended up getting annoyed with the autocomplete feature taking over things such as snippet expansion in vscode, so I turned it off personally. I felt that the battling against the assistant made around a break even productivity gain overall. Except for regular expressions, that I have basically offloaded to AI almost in its entirety for non trivial things.

Regex is easier to write than read so it seems not the best use of AI given you actually verify what it gives you and don't just take it on faith :/

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#405
After devin "figures out" 10 issues, what does the code look like? Those are the easy ones, and if you haven't fixed them cleanly, the next 10 will be more difficult to solve, for human and for robot. Now do this for several years. Can devin create its own bug reports and issues? It better be able to!

I'm curious what a large, mature codebase, with complex internals and legacy code looks like after you sick devin on it. Not pretty I suspect. In fact, I think it will become so difficult to fix that nobody -- neither human nor devin -- will be able to clean up the mess. By sheer volume, a broken ball of unfixable spaghetti.

I would be immensely pissed off if someone did this to an open source project of mine, or even to a closed-source codebase I'm working on. Not only would it not be useful, it would be moving backwards. Creating an icky vomit mess that we will probably have to spend years cleaning up after bug reports and complaints from customers begin mounting, and competitors can iterate faster.

Does that sound like something you want to deal with in your software business?

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machines currently are at an amateur level, but amateurs across the board on the knowledge base. Amateurs at Python, Fortran, C, C++ and all programming languages. Amateurs at car engineering, airplane engineering, submarine engineering etc. Amateurs at human biology, animal biology, insect biology and so on. I don't know anyone who is an amateur at everything.

What does it mean exactly to be an amateur at "submarine engineering"? It certainly doesn't mean you know how to build a submarine.

They cannot make a submarine themselves, or design it, but when they reach 50 percent, they will reach 50% at everything.

In submarine engineering, they will be able to design and construct it in some way like 3d print it, and the submarine will be able to move into the water for some time before it sinks. Yeah, probably for submarines a higher percent should be achieved before they are really useful.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#407
post #405

After devin "figures out" 10 issues, what does the code look like? Those are the easy ones, and if you haven't fixed them cleanly, the next 10 will be more difficult to solve, for human and for robot. Now do this for several years. Can devin create its own bug reports and issues? It better be able to! I'm curious what a large, mature codebase, with complex internals and legacy code looks like after you sick devin on…

It comes across harshly. The demo is genuinely technically impressive. But may I suggest: apply devin to your own codebase first -- then decide if it's something you want to gift to the rest of us.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machines currently are at an amateur level, but amateurs across the board on the knowledge base. Amateurs at Python, Fortran, C, C++ and all programming languages. Amateurs at car engineering, airplane engineering, submarine engineering etc. Amateurs at human biology, animal biology, insect biology and so on. I don't know anyone who is an amateur at everything.

What does it mean exactly to be an amateur at "submarine engineering"? It certainly doesn't mean you know how to build a submarine.

Perhaps, amateur could engineer a submarine that goes and stays at 10 feet deep? And it does not carry a nuc load?
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