Devin is Here to Scare Programmers!
Startup Cognition today has revealed Devin, the world’s first AI Software Engineer, and it’s revolutionary!
I don’t overreact when it comes to AI news, as a lot of it is just hype created by marketing. But the first AI Software Engineer?! That one you cannot just ignore. It can code, debug, and create a whole website or app within only minutes. Here is the demo:
“Meet Devin, the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer” is how the blog post of Cognition starts. It can impressively solve 13.86% of real-world open-source problems. This software engineering benchmark known as SWE-bench was scored only 4.80% by Claude 2 and 1.74% by GPT4.
Why Are We JUST Seeing This?
The problem of developing a full-fledged AI software engineer was two-fold, the second one being waaay more important than the first:
Dedicated AI for programming is not worked on by as many compared to General AI.
Reasoning and Planning are not simple to achieve!
And the 2nd one is the most important: to be able to PLAN! Developing software from 0–100 requires making various decisions and planning your way forward. Planning is one of the yet-to-be-achieved topics of AI.
“We are an applied AI lab focused on reasoning” is what you can read in Cognition’s blog. While their product seems exotic and practical, I won’t be surprised to see their niche solve much more fascinating problems by leveraging reasoning.
Is Devin just employing existing LLMs on a step-by-step procedure for programming? Maybe so, but we won’t know until Cognition shares more info on how Devin works. However, seeing Cognition’s emphasis on reasoning, I will put my bet on a more sophisticated approach.
What this yields, is another proof that the paradigm of programming WILL change from writing code to designing software. Coding will not be relevant as AI can do it much better easily. What will be required is an engineer who knows what to code and what to design.