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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#191

Post by zarathustreal »

eggdaft wrote: post #177
breadsniffer01 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of startups are selling the dream/hype of not ever having to learn to code. Be aware that it’s hype. Learn to code if you want to build stuff. They will be tools for those that have the knowledge needed to effectively use them.

I’m actually really amazed by LLMs and think the world is going to change dramatically as a result. But the “you won’t need to code” reminds me “you won’t need to learn to drive”. It’s the messy interface with the real world in both cases that basically requires AGI. If AGI is just a decade off then, yep, I won’t need to code. But a decade is a long time and, more importantly, we’re probably more than a decade away.…

+1 for the titanic analogy. If there ever comes a point that we no longer need to learn to code, I’m taking that as a sign that I’m literally living in a matrix-esque simulation.

The point at which someone like myself is allowed to become aware that a company has developed that level of AI is well beyond the point of no return.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#193

Post by Verdex »

hackerlight wrote: post #106
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #78

Earlier 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.

If it was actually working for anyone, then they would be selling software engineering time at the same but slightly cheaper price as existing software engineering time costs today so they could capture those sweet margins.

This is a company spending investor money selling pickaxe hand grips during a gold rush.

For real evidence, look for companies selling engineering time much greater than the amount of their total engineer count who have good customer retention across projects.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#194

Post by nurettin »

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…

I think it requires years of proficiency in the field you are asking about in order to get openai to produce meaningful, useful output. I can make use of it, but sometimes it makes me think "how would a newbie even phrase an objection to this misunderstanding or omission?" Currently it seems gpts are pretty much not on par with the needs of non-experts.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#195

Post by mikebelanger »

nsypteras wrote: post #88

Clearly an extremely impressive demo and congrats on the launch. I do wonder how often the bugs Devin encounters will be solvable from the simple fixes that were demonstrated. For instance, I notice in the first demo Devin hits a KeyError and decides to resolve it by wrapping the code in a try-catch. While this will get the code to run, I immediately imagined cases where it's not actually an ideal solution (maybe it'…

Yeah that was my question too. Its one thing to know the most simple fix for a KeyError issue, its another to understand that its the result of not assigning the proper key in some other part of the code, or like you said, maybe it called the wrong API endpoint and passing that into the dictionary.

Somewhat related: is anyone else not really impressed by Devin fixing the errors that are very preventable with a stricter language like Rust? The demo shows Devin coding in both Python in Rust, but I consider the latter being way less energy intensive in terms of maintenance. Then again, exhaustive pattern matching and strict typing won't get you lots of VC dollars these days.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#196

Post by malux85 »

brigadier132 wrote: post #189
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…

Claude Opus is working for me. It's not perfect but it definitely handles busy work well enough that it's a net positive. Like I add some new fields to a table and ask it to update all the files that depend on the field and it works after 1 or 2 tries. There is a time saving benefit but there is also an avoiding mental fatigue benefit for busywork.

This is what I use it for too --

Write me the molecular simulation boilerplate because these crappy tools all have their own esoteric DSLs, then I tweak the parameters to my use case, avoiding the busywork -

e.g. "Write me a simulation for methane burning in air"

Gives me a boilerplate, I modify the initial conditions (concentrations, temperatures, etc) and then deploy. Have the LLM do the busy-work, so I dont have to spend ages reading docs or finding examples just to get started.

Now deploy to a stable environment. Thats what I'm trying to help with by building https://atomictessellator.com

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#197

Post by empath-nirvana »

swalsh wrote: post #41
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #15

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…

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.

There is not a limited amount of software engineering that can be done. There's only the amount of software engineering that it is _economical_ to do at any given point. If AI makes software development cheaper and more efficient, people will just use apply it to more use cases. It's never been the case that making programming cheaper has lead to fewer programmers -- quite the opposite.

This change is roughly analogous to the shift from punch cards to compilers. It's just a more "natural language" way to do programming. A lot of the drudgery associated with coding will go away and competent programmers will shift to higher level design work.

Even in a future where AI is better than human software engineers at every single programming task (which I don't believe will be the case any time soon), there is still comparative advantage. AI will not have the _capacity_ to do every single programming task and there's going to still be lots of work for people to do.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#199

Post by anxman »

nurettin wrote: post #194
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…

I think it requires years of proficiency in the field you are asking about in order to get openai to produce meaningful, useful output. I can make use of it, but sometimes it makes me think "how would a newbie even phrase an objection to this misunderstanding or omission?" Currently it seems gpts are pretty much not on par with the needs of non-experts.

This is my experience too. You have to be have deep domain knowledge to really get the LLM to do what you want. Then it saves me a ton of time.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#200

Post by pushedx »

Scott Wu! I met Scott at a competitive programming event a few years back.

He is one of a very small group of people (going back to 1989) to get a perfect raw score at the IoI, the olympiad for competitive programming.

https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/2686

Glad to see that he's putting his (unbelievable) talents to use. To give you a sense, at the event where I met him, he solved 6 problems equivalent to Leetcode medium-to-hard problems in under 15 minutes (total), including reading the problems, implementing input parsing, debugging, and submitting the solutions.

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