Meet Devin the world’s First AI software Engineer from a stealth AI startup

Introducing Devin, the very first AI software engineer created by the hands of Cognition. You heard it right, an AI software engineer based on the rent capability of Artificial Intelligence. 

Cognition AI, a company you might not ever heard of, since it is seen as a stealthy AI startup that has raised a whopping $21 million funding led by Funders Fund. They just announced their first product to the world, Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer.

Meet Devin: AI software engineer

Devin the world’s first AI software engineer failed as Tireless, a skilled Teammate by its developers. Devin can handle –

• Difficult engineering task easily
• Make proper decision-making based on the facts 
• Plan complicated tasks ahead of time
• It has the memory to recall any text.
• Capability to learn over time, standard for any AI.
• Correct any mistake in coding
• Context finding

That’s not where the train even stops, the AI is now equipped with commonly used developer tools such as code editor, browser, shell to further ease the engineering problems. The team uploaded a video titled AI finds and fixes a bug that I didn’t catch.

That goes on to tell you how powerful the AI is at handling real-life scenarios encountered by many common software engineers all around the world. Cognition even provided a list of capabilities of their engineer by adding Devin can understand and implement new technologies, ability to create and deploy applications, and detecting the bugs and fixing it in codebases.

Scott Wu, the chief executive of Cognition showed us how Devin operates in the field by dropping a video. He shared his vision for Devin by saying  –

“Teaching AI to be a programmer is actually a very deep algorithmic problem that requires the system to make complex decisions and look a few steps into the future to decide what route it should pick”. 

He continued…

“It’s almost like this game that we’ve all been playing in our minds for years, and now there’s this chance to code it into an AI system”

How powerful is Devin dealing with real-world engineering problems

One of the powerful features of Devin happens to be its constant learning, to put it simply, the ability to train its own model to work better the next time. While the feature is pretty common in almost all AI tools, with Devin, it can be terrifying.

Subham Saboo, author who has covered topics such as GPT-3 & Neural Search in Prod in the past has this to say about the state of Devin as of today.  

When evaluated on the SWE-Bench benchmark, which asks an AI to resolve GitHub issues found in real-world open-source projects, Devin correctly resolves 13.86% of the issues unassisted, far exceeding the previous state-of-the-art model performance of 1.96% unassisted and 4.80% assisted.

The proficiency of Devin superseded the capabilities of a human engineer, the constant growth of its own system and the ability to fine tune its own model will make Devin better than dozens of human minds put together.

Devin also managed to ace every question during engineer interviews at top leading AI firms in the world, and it has also handled a couple of freelance projects on Upwork.

Reactions from the real engineers to Devin

Guess you can imagine the reactions to this news have not all been positive, people who are on the way to an engineering degree or planning to hold a job in this sector are terrified of the prospect of being replaced by an AI.

The growth of AI and the constantly evolving nature of its core has left many show their concerns on X about Devin developed by Cognition. Here are some of them –

The potential for Devin is very high in the industry, it will quickly overcome major and minor problems in the workplace. As it possesses the skills to hone its own model over time with more funding we will see Devin replacing white collar jobs like a nightmare many envisioned years ago.

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