We Need to Talk about Devin
In the collective Sprint that the world is executing on AI Projects, Devin has sprung onto the scene amidst much aplomb, fear and anticipation 😱🎉
Devin is touted as the world’s first AI programmer who can
- Write code in Python and Javascript
- Debug written code
- Write and run tests on the code written
- Learn new programming languages
- Manage infrastructure
Devin has also been executing some jobs in Upwork and there is a video made by the makers of Devin, showing that off.
Okay, so amidst the fear and the frenzy, there are caveats too 👀
As with a lot of things,
The Devin is in the details
Devin has been able to solve 13.86% of problems in the benchmarking tests 🤷🏻♂️
While this is a significant improvement from the paltry 4.8% before, as you see there are some leaps to be leapt.
But Cognition (the creators of Devin), seem to be hard at work and these benchmarking numbers are likely to keep going up 💪
Now before we look at some possible trends, let’s break down the segments of problems in software development.
Software development is and always be an extremely creative, intellectually demanding and hard profession.
But there are several layers to this 🧱
- You have the hard, complex problems that need patience and creativity to define, prioritise, plan, execute, test, deploy, measure and improve.
- You have the easier-to-automate problems that still need creativity but automation can leapfrog some of that complexity easily.
- And then a dizzying layered middle ground of problems of different shapes and sizes.
Website development is a good case study to apply this framework to
If you see https://www.flyhyer.com/ you will know the kind of art I am talking about :)
So, with Devin a few things will happen-
The sprawling middle will start to diminish
Developers with Devin will be able to demolish the easier problems more easily. With its computing power behind it 🔥 Devin will be able to execute hordes of tests, perform 0–1 deployments and manage pipelines. And the developers using Devin, will be able to leap faster.
The easiest problems will not benefit from Devin because the costs may not be justified and employing extremely cheap talent can do just fine.
So your problem segments start to look like this
Humans will continue to make their mark with the hard problems, probably using Devin for some early acceleration. But it’s the easier problems with some justified cost, which will start disappearing. Imagine the repeated Excel cleaning tasks big corporations have to take? Or the unit tests that QA manager must attach to the prod submission files? Those are the kind of things which will go away.
But again, the Devin is in the fooking details.
Caveat
We need to see how good Devin is at understanding vague, cryptic problem statements.
That will be crucial because Devin will also need to understand domain concepts and nuances before it starts pruning cloud resources and writing writing react libraries. Time will tell ⏱️
More AI Team mates will arrive
And will land with the trademark superhero pose.
Yes, you will soon see AI Product Managers, AI Testers, AI Engineering Managers- the AI Race will ensure of it 🐎
They will operate on a similar paradigm that I have explained above.
More fear mongering and more non IT careers
With Devin having already inspired rows of texts in blogs (ahem!) and videos and fear, more folks may look to guide their wards to more non IT careers. But this trend will take time because the current education market will continue its inertia for sometime, before these forces come into effect (I expect parents watching all this unfold impact to-be-graduates in 4–6 years of time)
Competitive coding will (slowly) die
Hobby coding (like Advent of Code) will probably stay. Even there, you will find the mods requesting humans to not take AI assistance. But where there are prizes involved? Why bother 🤷🏻♂️ Either humans will need to come up Devin-proof problem statements or there will be the slow painful death of online coding contests.
The branching of Prompt Engineering
Devin will propel the skyrocketing of prompt engineering as a career and it will branch into “General Prompt Engineering”, “Technical Prompt Engineering”, “Marketing….” etc.
Let’s keep a close eye on Devin’s movements. Till then, if there is anyone named Devin in your team, you have a found a new person to troll 😂
