OpenDevin – open-source implementation of devin

Gotta say, I admire the chutzpah. Commoditize the commoditization software, it's the most open source thing ever

There are two parts to “writing a Devin”.

1) a pretty user interface, a backend service layer, all the normal things you’d need for a desktop app or saas.

2) a backend that can actually do work.

I’m going to go out a limb here and say, building an MVP of the UI is a waste of your time.

…because, unless you know how to build the backend (ie. part 2), you actually, have no idea what you need to build for part one.

You can copy of the UI from the Devin videos.

You can build your own langchain framework.

You can fine tune an open model on GitHub issues.

…but just like having building a gpt4 is harder than just “add more params”, building something that works like Devin appears to work requires a reasonably sharp “step up” in capability between what literally everyone has been doing with gpt4 until now, and being able to turn that into a useful framework for solving actual engineering tasks.

So… don’t hold your breath. If you see someone building a UI (like this https://github.com/OpenDevin/OpenDevin/tree/main/frontend, https://github.com/stitionai/devika/tree/main/ui; just read the commit log, it’s basically just ui) it means they’re doing the easy work (part 1) because they don’t know how to do the hard part (part 2).

…so, interesting, but this doesn’t smell like a really serious effort (at least yet).

I guess you could argue that it’s important “setup infrastructure” stuff that any project starts with… but I’m just sceptical.

I can draw pictures of a Devin too. A serious effort would be trying to replicate what Devin does not what it looks like.

We really do spend half our time chiding everyone for anthropomorphising the AI and then the other half giving them human names and trying to make them explicitly emulate human behaviours that they aren't intrinsically good at.

I don't get what's special about Devin. I noticed the same logic issues I've seen with ChatGPT or Copilot or Gemini.

OpenAI already did spend quite a bit on software development reinforcement learning and we already have models with huge context windows.

We've already seen OSS projects where ai agents collaborate to create code projects.

If you use CodeLlama, throw some engineering manpower to create feedback loop with compilers, linters and other tooling to improve the code generated you can probably match Devin's performance. I can get some pretty good results feeding back compiler's output to ChatGPT, if that were automated, my impression of ChatGPT would be much better.

So my bet is that an open source Devin is absolutely possible.

> I don't get what's special about Devin.

Did you watch the YouTube videos?

I’m also skeptical it can do all the things it appears to be able to do, but I think it’s undeniable that what they show it doing (totally unverified as it is)…

…is significantly more capable than any other programming agent I’ve seen.

If openAI had that capability, they would be selling it.

They are not. I doubt very much that they’re just hoarding it and keeping it to themselves; gpt4 just can’t do it out of the box.

It is not that simple.

It is not just a fancy prompt for gpt4.

If it was that easy, someone would have done a year ago.

> If you use CodeLlama

Oh come on. These pathetic little open source models are shit compared the vendor offerings.

This is daydreaming about what might be, not what actually exists.