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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#441

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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.

Many things have been claimed to be the "death" of software careers (.com crash, outsourcing, remote work, etc.) and yet we have more demand than ever.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#442

Post by zeroonetwothree »

pzo wrote: post #103
andrewmutz wrote: post #36

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. We continually hear anxiety about technology leading to mass unemployment and it keeps not happening. Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Technological advancements transformed agriculture from being…

The key phrase is "over the last 200 years". 200 years ago there was just 1 billion people. People had decade(s) to reskill to new profession. Their offspring picked different profession if their parents didn't have good prospect. Changing profession was also not requiring half a decade learning. Now imagine that AI will make 20% people redundant over next 5 years - thats ~1.6 billion people.

To be fair most of the drop was only over a ~100 year period.

BTW there is little AI makes "20% people redundant over next 5 years". I would bet $$$ against this.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#443

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Retric wrote: post #81
andrewmutz wrote: post #36

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. We continually hear anxiety about technology leading to mass unemployment and it keeps not happening. Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Technological advancements transformed agriculture from being…

Not all jobs are the same. The Real Median US income in 2019 was 78,250$/year in 2022 it had fallen to 74,580. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N The only way that happens is if millions of people are significantly worse off. Most people can find work in the big economy, that doesn’t mean replacing a 100k/year job with a 25k/year job is equivalent. Across a long enough time horizon technology tends to m…

A 5% decrease is "significantly worse off"? And it's still higher than 2018--it's not really reasonable to expect an increase every single year, you should look at the longer-term trend.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#444

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ewild wrote: post #95
swatcoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The printing press replaced the need for scribes but introduced the need for typesetters. Talented scribes did cool things with illustrations and flourishes that were lost in the transition, but ultimately spent quite a lot of their time stroking the letter "e" or "i" or whatever. Meanwhile, typesetters found themselves in a whole new creative domain which was a different one than the scribes had been working in whil…

eventually we will reach the limits of what can be discovered with physics. the same applies here. eventually the limit of what a human can improve on through a job will be done. is this that point? idk but there will be one time that "new jobs" arent made

This is like saying that because the possible books that can be written are finite (assuming some max length) then eventually every books will be written and writers will have nothing to do. While mathematically true, the word "eventually" is doing a lot of work.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#445

Post by zeroonetwothree »

eloisant wrote: post #62
siva7 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have dismissed this thought a year ago but seeing how fast openai is moving, in 5 years those ai assistants will be what nowadays human junior/intermediate devs are.

That's exactly what people were saying of self driving cars 15 years ago. "We're so close, within 5 years we're have full self driving, and in 10 nobody will need a driver's licence!"

I remember discussing it in 2009 exactly as you say. I thought "my kids won't ever need to learn to drive". Sadly it turned out to be wrong :(

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#446

Post by zeroonetwothree »

blibble wrote: post #334
pzo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference with self-driving cars hype is that they need to be 99.999% good so pretty much perfect to be useful on road and be incorporated mainstream. AI doing some tasks 90% as good as human is good enough. Self driving cars got massively improved in the last 15 years. I remember 15 years ago when DARPA were doing their first self driving challenge and the current tech we have is like magic comparing to what we…

need a few more 9's than that otherwise everyone would be dead within 50 years

99.999% on an annual basis is ~10x safer than human drivers

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#447

Post by zeroonetwothree »

pzo wrote: post #119
noncoml wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me fool but s this hype reminds me the hype about self-driving cars coming in a year back in 2014. AI engineers are coming, but I think we would have long retired before they reach a point where they can replace us.

The difference with self-driving cars hype is that they need to be 99.999% good so pretty much perfect to be useful on road and be incorporated mainstream. AI doing some tasks 90% as good as human is good enough. Self driving cars got massively improved in the last 15 years. I remember 15 years ago when DARPA were doing their first self driving challenge and the current tech we have is like magic comparing to what we…

It depends on what the 10% is. For example, if your code only works 90% of the time that's not exactly good enough to use...

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#448

Post by zeroonetwothree »

jprete wrote: post #129
mym1990 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this any different than the industrial revolution ushering in a new age, or for that matter any technology that creates huge efficiencies in labor? The truth is that the future is still very uncertain, and while the easiest thing to do is yell "they took er jerbs" from the top of your lungs, maybe think about how to effectively move forward into the future. There is a book called "Who Moved My Cheese?" and I w…

The whole point of AGI is to be able to do everything a human can do, so this argument doesn't apply in the same way it did for mechanical automation.

Many jobs require a corporeal body so at least we have that.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#449

Post by zeroonetwothree »

goat_whisperer wrote: post #116

People who try to draw historical analogies to AI replacing humans say things like: "cars replaced horse drawn carriages. But we managed to adapt to that, the carriage drivers got new jobs." My dudes. We are the HORSES being replaced in this scenario.

How about tractors replaced humans plowing fields? Or literally any other example of automation...

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#450

Post by zeroonetwothree »

sailingparrot wrote: post #284
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.

> If you can tell if a solution is correct or not --- well, then you don't need to have AI write it for you. Did you just solve P=NP? Many things are trivial to verify, but hard/time consuming to code up. You probably shouldn't rely on this to write critical software, no matter the amount of manual QA you throw at it afterwards, but there is an abundance of non-critical use cases where you can quickly check if a solu…

Most problems in "P" are not "trivial".
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