AI Software Engineers

Day 75 / 366

A company called Cognition recently released a demo of their new product Devin, a Software Engineer powered by AI. It scared a lot of people, especially software engineers (or “Human Software Engineers” as Cognition likes to refer to us). Does this mean that AI will soon replace coders?

So what can Devin do?

Based on the demo it could

• Create apps from scratch with just simple text prompts.
• It can use the console to debug its code and fix it.
• It can look up documentation and tutorials online and follow them.
• It can understand the existing codebase of a git repo and create PRs to fix an issue.
• It can finish tasks from upwork on its own.

Sounds too good to be true right? I think it might be.

Whenever you see an AI “demo” not out yet for the general public to try, you should look at it skeptically. Remember what happened with Google’s demo of Gemini? A lot of these demos are carefully made and sometimes even edited. These are meant more to attract VC investors than customers.

For instance, we don’t know how many tasks on Upwork they had to go through before they found one that Devin could do unassisted. The GitHub issue that it fixed was a pretty basic one as well, again we don’t know how it would perform at any given GitHub issue picked randomly.

Also, it is not cheap. Devin uses GPT-4 through the API, and simple tasks that a junior dev could have done in an hour costs 100s of dollars to do.

Of course, people would say that this is just the start and that AI will get better and cheaper. But then we also said that Bitcoin will replace all of FIAT currency. As of right now, I do not think there is anything for us developers to worry about.