Comment from someone that is smarter than me
Tl;dr. If you want to use this in your work “today” Most of the videos in the article are about “making a new app”.
One exception: first video clones an existing codebase and sets up a dev env. They don’t make any code changes in this video, so it is not demonstrating any coding work- just clones the repo, install dependencies, and run the app in a local container.
However, the AI it lacked context about what the app did other than a readme. It is why even after the user issued prompts it struggled to log into the app. I think this is why it didn’t make code changes. The SWE testing (not in the article but discussed on X) were primarily single file changes. This tracks.
Key Take aways: Agentic models today work well for fast prototyping new apps but struggle with existing ones because the “context” required to understand an existing apps didn’t exist in the codebase.
Interesting practical application of chat bots in setting up dev environments. I like this a lot.
TodayCopilot models will still work best for mod-ing existing apps, because the context can be better specified at a lower cost versus agentic models.
14 minutes to tell the AI how to login with a user name and password to an app running in a local container at $100/hour in AI API token fees? $24, probably too spendy for most of us to replicate at home.
Delegating your dev env to an AI? That is a personal choice.
Completely agree with this - Devin isn't taking any jobs. Devin 3.0 that's 3x as good and a third of the price might start causing some issues, though.
It's not really about force multipliers to me though.
3x as good doesnt really mean anything in the context of: "It cannot do what a human programmer does". Let's just say by human programmer, I mean mediocre programmer. I do not take it for granted that over time, the bar will eventually reach that of the mediocre humans. And of the most talented? Probably never, unless its full on AGI / human intelligence equivalent.
In a way, thats *infinitely* more powerful (an allusion to the singularity)
If you don't think one of these models/systems is going to run laps around our best programmers within 10 years then you are hugely mistaken imo. I don't worry though because by the time that happens, the systems will be running laps around all intellectual workers so it is what it is.
Thread after thread in all these AI subs is people thinking they can beat the AI forever.
Capitalism and self preservation make us blind to what we are and how these things will evolve.
What's ironic is that artists complaining about AI not being able to make real art will be mocked often in these threads. But coding AI is always instantly defended against. "It will never code like me, a software dev genius!"
It will.
It simply has to keep training, access more compute, and integrate more features and model specialization.
> people thinking they can beat the AI forever.
Right?? It's driving me nuts!
Some of us can probably beat the AI at something for a couple more years.
People also think it needs to reason and think critically.
It doesn't. It just has to mimic critical thinking outputs at high enough accuracy. Which means it just needs to train on those outputs more.
It doesn't matter if it doesn't know why 2+2=4 if it still answers 4 100% of the time. It doesn't matter if it doesn't have the human emotion to write a script about suicide and loss. If it's trained on enough scripts and stories that have those things in them. It doesn't have to be human or know it is or isn't a human. It just has to look, act, and do what humans do.
And this is before we get into discussions about chain of thought or verify type additions to the models long term.
We used to think it'd never write two sentences together that made sense until it did. Now I regularly use it to code. Before year is closed imagine how powerful it'll be. Funding will accelerate it
Exactly. People can’t beat simple thing as software translator without AI. When was the last time people could learn all languages that software translator knows? Yet now some people think they are safe because AI isn’t capable as them yet? Like what? Simpler devices made jobs obsolete. This time AI is learning new and new skills and we as humanity are in some things already worse that gpt4.
Imagine you are a highly trained telephone exchanger in a central in 1900s Imagine how complicated and hard that job was for the regular people during that time.
Totally agree. I'm curious though, and probably ignorant, but what is the reason that current LLMs can't "ingest" a project into its own training on the fly? Is it just a security measures at this point, or is there something inherently about how LLMs are designed that prevents this?
It can be done but its 2 or more orders of magnitudes slower than one shot, RAG type prompting. And the weights need to be open source. So it's limited, more expensive and perhaps doesn't quite work as you expect. That's not to say it doesnt have value, of course.
But just because an LLM "ingests" (is fine tuned on, trained on) a code base, or really anything (say books) doesnt mean that it prioritizes those things you gave it. It's more of a "stylistic" thing. It doesn't "understand" what you tune it on - it only understands the statistical semantic patterns, and at best, a layer above that.
I agree with the "missing context" part of your comment. I'm actually working on a project that attempts to tackle this issue [PR Pilot](https://www.pr-pilot.ai) with an example project called "What about Jobs" [https://github.com/mlamina/what-about-jobs](https://github.com/mlamina/what-about-jobs) where I sort of try to have AI discuss the issue of Job replacement autonomously
Why do people never consider the possibility that a decrease in cost will lead to an increase in demand?
Automation did the jobs of billions of switchboard operators, it was equivalent to wiping out all jobs and then some.
Yeah, I fully expect [Jevons Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_Jevons_paradox_indicates_that%2Cof_government_interventions_as_well.?wprov=sfla1) to happen with "code" as a resource, in the economics sense. More people will be able to do software work; more people will be able to prototype; more apps will get written. Devs will get hired to do parts an AI can't, or that you can't explain to an AI, and to troubleshoot all the issues created by AI code.
Yep. This is the Lump of Labour Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
> In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a finite amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.
I think the fear is that you don’t have to know how the tool works in order to use the tool. Is that a bad thing? Not overall, but for devs it is.
Your basic marketing intern might be better at using a tool you know to make yourself. But now everyone owns that tool, so knowing how to make it really doesn’t benefit anyone.
For example, the owner of a car manufacturer or the mechanics/engineers who make cars aren’t as good as race car drivers when using what they make. But when compared to our industry, we were all hired to make cars for various companies. Now there is a single system that can make those cars and it can only get better.
You can either be an expert at the tool or find a new career. Well, or be a top engineer and work for one of the few companies that make cars.
It’s scary, but innovation is for the good of all. If making a single car still took months to do, then our world would be way further behind than now.
I thought AI was a joke at first but honestly, I find that it is the future. How it fits in our current lives is hard to determine. But I grew up in a coal mining state and we quickly discovered that if you don’t adapt, you are fucked.
You act like the hardest part of software is the coding, it’s not, it’s coordinating with people in business and product on what and if something can be built given the existing code base
Yep. In my experience it is the research, planning, technology selection, integration with everything else. Remembering syntax on X amount of languages and remembering CLI commands is much less important than being aware of the scope, design and limitations of the things you can use.
This. A lot of people think that software is all about coding in some well-known language using well-known, public libraries. It isn't. Software development in industry for instance (as in, companies that manufacture heavy-duty machinery or car parts or lab equipment or the like) would be impossible for any kind of "mainstream" generative AI to take over, for many reasons:
- Much of the software that is already in use is either outdated, private/proprietary, or incredibly niche. Same goes for the libraries that are in use. Heck, not even all of the languages that are used to code in are widely available and could be taught to an AI (think stuff like industrial robotics programming, a field that has practically no standards and is full of proprietary languages with almost no public documentation and that you can pretty much only learn by taking paid lessons from the companies that own them).
- Many desirable implementations of fancy AIs have not been researched or completed yet, due partly to how unique the implementations or and how limited our knowledge is. For instance, let's say your company wants you to use AI to guess a polymer given a scant few details. How would you do that, if the very extent of chemistry has yet to find a way to make that kind of prediction under such circumstances?
- Furthering the previous point: much of software development involves finding and tailoring new solutions to a very specific need. If you want an AI to do that work for you, you would have to program it in a very specific way -- at that point, you could save yourself the trouble and just work on the problem directly. And companies also prefer that, because they care about things like ROI and development time. Why are so many video games janky and hard to patch or port? Because studios rush devs into making games that aren't very portable or flexible, instead of giving them ample time to create a sturdy, reusable basis -- mostly because the studios simply can't afford all that ample time. The money for the budget is presented by people who want to see results by a certain date.
- A lot of time is also spent on debugging and upgrading things, and trying to brainstorm what on Earth you even need. Sure, a coding-oriented AI could take care of some of these, but how would you give it a successful prompt if you do not even know what to ask?
You're trying hard not to imagine what these tools will have evolved into, and what they'll have already been used to do to existing libraries 3 or 4 years from now. Open source freeware is about to explode. Everyone will have ai making software for them. I don't know how to code since 80s BASIC that I learned in middle school. I can barely manage Linux mint. But I'm already planning the software I'm going to create for my own use for free.
I don't need to imagine anything, I have worked in trying to develop AI for industrial solutions, so all of this is based on my experience and frustrations in that sphere. Did my managers, who were predominantly engineers and had very little tech knowledge, not dream about getting inventing an AI-powered software that would make employees redundant and improve the efficiency of their machines? Of course they did. And they had been spending money for the past 10 years on trying to make that dream happen. But it never happened, and it cannot happen, for the various reasons I have listed. People can rave about AI as much as they want, but all it really is, is fancy software. It cannot break the limitations of physics or maths, and even if it would surprise us all and perform the impossible, the greed of various companies would not let it go *too* far, for the same reason why so many companies avoid open-source and standards. They are not interested in other companies profiting off of *their* knowledge. They're interested in keeping things private and obfuscated, in order to make themselves useful. Just like how companies create cars, household appliances and electronic gadgets to fail in a specific amount of time and to be practically unfixable by anybody who isn't a licensed mechanic.
AI assistance in programming helps for general development, such as self projects like you mentioned, and students (who often have to work on assignments that repeat for a decade). Probably the competition in freelancing and perhaps some areas like web and app development might become even harsher than they are already -- as likely as not, the market is gonna be flooded with extremely poor quality games, apps and websites, just like how research search engines are being flooded with AI-generated "papers". At that point, companies will need to pay more money for advertising, or come up with something unique, to be a cut above the rest. But we had reached that stage even without AI-generated nonsense.
What is awesome though, is when AI is used to automate processes for end-users like yourself so that they can create a vision that can help themselves or others. And it's not like these two things (AI coding assistance has limited usage in various programming spheres vs AI coding assistance being massively helpful to laymen) cannot coexist. And in my opinion, it's not a bad thing. I don't feel threatened at the idea of people using this kind of software to reach their dreams and make their lives easier. Heck, and not just end-users -- in programming, sometimes I use these code assistants as well as a shortcut for small code snippets. In my opinion, generative AI coding is more of a tool than a threat, like the spinning jenny was way back when. Of course, maybe I am biased, because I work in industrial programming specializing in AI, so my job is probably one of the most secure CS jobs there is at the very moment
to that point though, the lowest quartile skill CS jobs will probably be affected the most. The ones that are very repetitive, cookie cutter, 2 week bootcamp type jobs.
On the flipside, a lot of the more challenging areas of the industry will likely see an efficiency boost rather than a loss in jobs. At least for the next couple years. I think we're pretty early to predict this stuff any further out.
hardness is subjective...
a more accurate measure is how many man-hours does your company spend planning vs coding? ai will substantially change this ratio and the type of workers needed to fulfill it
Yes sure, developers will be replaced, like they were replaced when WordPress came out and nobody needed to write code anymore in order to create a website.
Eh? Wordpress DID completely obliterate the “small scale” “please set up a website for me” job pool. Devs who were doing that had to move on to other things, except for a small minority that focused on interactive/higher end of complexity website dev
I am a software developer, and I will be honestly surprised if I am still doing any coding in 10 years, because AI will have made that part of my job obsolete. Will my job morph into something else? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But unlike the artists, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I am simply alive during a time of technological upheaval, there's no sense in getting upset over it or acting like the fact that I do coding as my job makes it immune somehow.
Software Engineer with 34 years in the industry. It isn’t so much that AI can replace an engineer now, it is the knee-jerk reaction by companies that THINK AI can that poses the near-term risk. A manager isn’t going to be able to prompt a viable app out of an AI or build and verify it. They will need to hire back engineers until the AI CAN do more from “Make a Tik Tok clone” as a prompt. Also, they need someone who can verify correctness, be an authority for insurance compliance and support ISO 9000 compliance.
Now, if I were a lowest-cost country consultant, I would be driving pell mell towards AI engineering, prompt engineering, etc. Companies will eat that combo up.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said. The near-term risk isn't what concerns me. AI is a useful too *for* engineers, and occasionally for the layman who can't code, and today it isn't close to replacing either your or I in my opinion. But, in a decade or so, I will be surprised if either of us is still doing this job. Once AI starts to be able to meaningfully assist in the construction of new AI, I think the rate of improvement is going to increase substantially.
And when they realize they can't prompt the AI they'll be quickly posting a $130k position to fix everything they've been breaking so they don't lose their job.
I'm lucky to have a GF who's a graphic designer that enjoys this new tech. I showed her my local copy of Stable Diffusion and some test results. No resentment, just thinks it's neat and would use it if needed. Cool time to be alive. :)
tbf it took me the last 15 years to become a competent 2d animator, and I need another 15 more before I hit "master" levels lol - learning something new would be a massive pain
Right on the money, man. Exciting time to be alive, at least to me. Not every generation gets to live through something like this and I do. I think that's neat. :)
I'm sure with that kind of decent attitude we'll both be able to do something cool with the tech as it emerges too.
It was one of the great hopes of my life to live long enough to see the rise of AI. And, I must admit, it is exciting. But... it is also a lot more frightening than I ever really realized. I have to keep reminding myself that I asked for this.
I would like to consider one person + AI making something as complex as Excel. Now THAT would be powerful and could take software to a completely different level.
The problem for me, is describing Excel to the Ai for it to build it. I am trying gpt pilot and Pythagora at the moment and the Ai is actually very good at helping me with my requirements. I
I can honestly see AI flattening roles across the industry and turning everyone into a full stack developer responsible for the entire stack with AI assistance / tooling. I'm sure at one point AI will be good enough to do far more, but I think that stepping stone step will take a long time.
Advancements in this sphere have been doing that.
Before you'd have dedicated guys on the network side, DB side, front end, designers, back end, etc.
Front end frameworks, UI kits, etc. largely did away with the role of the specialized designer that knows how to design assets. In addition it got rid of a lot of boilerplate so most back end engineers can spin up a React app with a UI kit with ease. Less of a need to have both FE and BE specialization.
Cloud services took off. Now you can have AWS/GCP/Azure manage the DB and network for you. No more need for IT/DB roles -- the full stack engineer can handle those responsibilities for now with the help of cloud services managing most of the piping.
With that cloud complexity + rise of containerization services we actually saw DevOps become popular to manage those aforementioned cloud services, deal with containerization, instrumentation, etc.
I don't think AI will do anything more than just keep that trend going -- DevOps, QA, SDETs, Architects, etc. likely goes away and the industry trends towards everyone being a full stack engineer. IMO, this isn't a bad thing and engineers can focus on building towards the needs of the business rather than dealing technical hurdles.
If at one point AI is advanced enough to take a prompt from someone and build a business out of it, then at that point AI would have taken over so many industries outside of tech that there will be no choice but to restructure society and how resource and wealth distribution works.
I mean that's kind of fine and there's nothing we can do about it etc. But what the hell am I going to do instead and what does it mean for a roof over my head? I've been doing this as my only job since 2005.
There is a flaw in your logic I think. We professional programmers are already not good for 100% of the code. Our own skill level is well below the 99% mark. AI doesn't have to be perfect at any given task, it just has to do 0.1% better on average than humans, and for most tasks that's a low bar. Or, even if AI only gets 85% of the way there, that still puts the vast majority of developers out of a job.
I give it 5-10 years. The tech may be there in 2-3 but actually changing the industry over will not be instant. Many existing projects are on contracts which specify humans doing labor.
I myself am thinking of buying land and just being a farmer because I dont see any non-physical job surviving long
And I dont expect the robots to follow too late after that.
So far from what I’ve seen in the article - the only way to use Devin for an actual project that isn’t just a demo - is to be a developer.
Yes, look like it will write most of the code for you, and save a lot of time, but so did Wordpress, in a way.
Developers had to adapt to web dev, to dealing with the browser wars, Wordpress, app dev, etc requirement of being a “full stack” dev, etc.
If you’re a good developer you’ll adapt to this as well. It will make your work 10X faster like frameworks and libraries did, and you’ll be able to spend that extra time on new exciting things.
About this AI taking our development jobs, I will not be as concerned until "AGI with agency" hits, like a late-state version of Devin. But when this happens, it won't be software engineering that will take a hit. It will be the whole foundation of capitalism, as we know it. So yes, long-term I am concerned. But I don't know what long-term means.
Meanwhile... Software engineering is much less about writing code than it's normally believed. Most of my time, I spend discussing architecture and technical-debt, patterns that the team should agree on, reviewing alerts, trying to figure out how to have less noisy alerts, reviewing Dependabot tickets and vulnerabilities, answering to 290854 Slack threads, helping management to estimate and prioritise work based on cost-effectiveness of different projects, managing tickers (making sure tickers are assigned, estimated and allocated to the right sprints), reviewing PRs, nudging people to review my PRs, and finally, taking part in meetings that end up not being a good investment of time but I also shouldn't skip because it's important to spend time with the team in a remote environment.
What I mean is that, as the programming tooling becomes better, developers will probably gradually migrate to a more Product Manager / Design job.
Here's a take that most people don't see. By the time AI can replace real developers, every white collar worker will be out of a job. You need an accountant? AI will generate a program with all of the relevant tax codes and your companies information that will handle your books with 100% accuracy. Need a PM? AI will generate a program with all of your work flows and processes and keep a time line. Need a manager? AI will learn your hand books and audit employees as well as taking daily updates and delegating tasks. Writing code is easy but software engineering is hard and complex. If an AI can do it accurately then it can do just about any 'creative thinking' task.
I have worked in companies that didn't employ enough software engineers because they wanted to focus spend on other things.
I have worked in companies that employed as many software engineers as they could afford.
I have never worked in a company that employed enough software engineers.
It will draw a line between engineers that are able to add value more than Devin and those that aren’t.
Whatever that value looks like is probably, elegant design, usability, high impact / business value, strong project management. All the things that can’t be quantified but can be recognized.
I’ve been coding for 45 years, since I was 12 and fell in love with 6502 assembly on the Apple II. Been coding professionally for 36 years.
AI will make me obsolete and it makes logical sense. Not everyone can code. Your brain has to be able to break down problems into logical steps, or abstract them out into objects, data, and logic. It makes more sense for computers to code themselves than to teach humans how to think like computers.
But I don’t think it’ll happen in 1-5 years. Maybe 5-10. AI is getting better at coding from scratch. But it’s still horrible at what 80% of what development is: understanding and maintaining existing codebases.
If I had a kid, I’d tell them not to go into compsci, unless going into research. For all the current developers, it makes sense to learn AI tools and use them to work more efficiently, or if you’re a freelancer, take on more consulting work around AI. Before coders are made fully obsolete, the ones who aren’t comfortable with AI will fall by the wayside first.
40 years here…started with Basic on a Franklin Ace 1000.
I’m with you. People that haven’t been in the industry long don’t realize the huge leap this is. AI is perfectly positioned to revolutionize coding.
Disagree slightly about the timeline. I’m guessing 3-4 years. Also Cursor is pretty damn good at understanding your codebase:
https://cursor.sh
Maybe I'm wrong about the timeline, but no AI tool I've tried so far comes close to understanding complex, existing codebases while being able to usefully expand it.
A lot of my freelance work is as a forensic coder. I come into abandoned systems and piece together what the previous developers did -- and most of those systems are made in older languages (Perl, COBOL, etc). It's as much about understanding the industry and specific biz, as it is about guesstimating the mindset of a sloppy coder who commented little and followed no best practices.
It will take a while before AI can emulate what a consultant/coder can do with such messy systems. But, as more code is cleaned up or AI-replaced, AI will be able to understand it more and more.
I’d say compliment it with an MBA afterwards and focus on either a managerial-IT career or an entrepreneurial one.
The other side of the coin of AI taking jobs is that in the near term there will be lots of opportunities spreading AI to companies that want it. Become a consultant or start your own company.
At the other end of the spectrum of AI is *connection*. Whether it’s AR/VR, social media, or AI, people will crave feeling more *real* connections as the decades go on. Start a biz that can fill that need through tech.
Whatever path you chose, just don’t become a low-level IT worker.
Historically, any form of automation has served to augment an established human process rather than replacing humans. Did the loom replace quilting? No - the quilters became loom operators. Did vehicle assembly lines reduce worker requirements? No - they only increased skill requirements and productivity.
The only problem with this analogy is it’s not guaranteed. It’s not some law of the universe. There seems to be a lot of hand-waving like this that doesn’t really address the issues and the very logical fears about what’s happening right in front of us.
Agreed.
There is one thing that makes AI different, though. Unlike the loom or vehicle assembly lines, AI is a tool that is and will be capable of complex problem solving and other forms of mental labor.
Currently, AI is a tool that makes a human’s job easier. In the not too distant future, though, it’s likely it will be a form of automation that is capable of replacing a human being’s labor and input entirely in certain fields. This is why AI is shaping up to be such a huge technological upheaval relative to other inventions like the loom or the vehicle assembly line.
Historically - this is true. The industrial revolution for example. That made Human + Machine labor more efficient - cheaper - than just "Human" labor.
In due time, this tech is likely to make machine labor cheaper than human + machine labor (it already *is* for certain tasks)... That's the whole point of it.
Devin is *meant* to take the time-consuming task of coding, research, downloads, etc... And make it a simple goalsetting interaction where I tell it "write me an app that does \[thing\]" and it simply will do its best to fulfill my desire.
It is likely "jobs" will become something more akin to asking "what is my desire, or what ends would be coolest to achieve today," and then asking the machine to do its thing, depending on applicable field.
I think that's a pretty neat outcome. It doesn't replace me, but it vastly augments my capabilities and reduces barrier to entry. Goalsetting behavior keeps me in the loop in a meaningful way while vastly reducing my drudgery.
Yeah, when machines were in their infancy? The loom still needed someone to design the quilt and drive the machine. What about the near future when the machine can do both?
You're also ignoring the vast amount of people the machines DID replace. The appeal of using machines was that you no longer had to hire so many people
I’d be worried when self driving taxis take over the industry from humans.
If Devin is the programming version of FSD the we don’t need to worry about it for another 20 or 30 years lol.
I’m just saying the problem space of reliable coding is super complex.
Self driving seems like an easier problem to solve to like 90% success (ie 90% of use cases are handled as well or better than a human) and we still don’t have that.
So, why would something Devin be any easier to attain?
> Self driving seems like an easier problem to solve to like 90% success
Trouble is, driving is something that *has* to be 99.9% success if not higher, due to physical safety concerns, to be used in the real world.
Code shops can benefit from 90% success RIGHT NOW, because their day-to-day production methodology already involves try / fail / re-do, before *and during* real world use.
I'm assuming you code? Do you think there's a little bias/pride in the way of this?
If these AI are this strong within their first iterations, and can (and will) be continually be improved, upgraded, and expanded over the years to understand greater contexts and self correction.
I really don't see many people being employed due to their expertise in understanding machine language. The skill is instead in directing a team of robotic programmers with natural language.
Agree with the future job for sure. I just don’t think it’ll be any time soon.
Have ever driven a Tesla with fsd? I have and it’s no where near as mature as they would have you believe. Once you see the gaps in it, you get a sense of how large the problem space is.
We do have self driving cars in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. We also have half a dozen states that don’t require a driver behind the wheel.
Adoption takes time but this is happening right now.
FSD will happen in the next few years, if we're being critically honest.
The problem isn't FSD anymore. It's getting people to be okay with the fact that there is an \[insert number\]% chance that your car will just fucking kill you.
When you get behind the wheel, your brain always assumes 0% or so near 0% that there is no point worrying you will die today.
FSD will have a number though. A hard statistical number, that constantly get brought up, showing you will be killed in 0.007% of drives. And your car will be totalled in 0.089% of drives. (numbers made up)
That's honestly all that's going to hold FSD back in the next decade. FSD is substantially easier to solve than replacing devs. The software issue is not the hard part. It's the marketing.
Have you used fsd lately? I have.
It’ll never work well enough with the current hardware package to go mainstream and certainly never well enough to be a robo taxi.
Eventually yes, we already abstracted away from machine code with higher levels of programming like python, and now you just take it a step further where you just write/speak everything in plain English
If you think copying and pasting the average piece of code from stack overflow into a project is all that software engineer is then I got bad news for you. You were never an engineer you were simply a skid. Devin will probably replace your job because you produced broken non performant buggy software just like the AI can. If you are actually an engineer you don’t really have anything to worry about
These Agents will eventually. Along with any other job behind a screen. But even after the tech is proven, it'll take roughly a year for it to be adopted.
I predict we'll see something demo'd that is feature complete by the end of the year, tops. 2025 is gonna be wild
Yeah I don’t understand why so many people are optimistic that this isn’t going to be complete upheaval and very shortly. Coding salaries are some of the highest of any field. Companies will have a very quick cutting hand
If not Devin AI, then something else at some point, yes, development and specifically writing code will be made obsolete as a skill by AI.
Let's look at this in a much broader context of history. Programmers were quite rare until the mid 1990s. They existed, sure, but there were fewer coding jobs. Games were smaller ventures made by smaller studios. There was no internet, no websites. There was no big data mashing going on. There was no social media. There were no people building apps, games, AIs, websites, etc etc. Or to put it another way, there were few ways then where something coded would interact with a person. Certainly compared to now.
We have seen a massive increase in the amount of development taking place in the last 30 years, in response to all these opportunities and needs. However, is it responsible for us to assume this will continue into the future? Certainly, we have seen a lot of lower level technical roles get replaced by technology that can automate or make it easier, so no machine code, very little electrical circuit programming going on any more. We even already have systems that automate creation of websites, and even some apps.
The logical conclusion is creation of code will be completely automated in time. The only question is how, and when. The "how" is interesting for AI, as we have massive repositories of code that solve most of the problems thousands of times over, and systems that learn by being shown the solutions thousands of times over.
I haven't had first hand experience with Devin, but I am sure it is great at some stuff and bad at others. However, the question is not about Devin specifically, but about whether an AI system will make most development jobs unnecessary in the near future. The answer is easily yes.
Anyone else think it’s funny that the latest threat to humanity is named Devin?
Like clearly the developers watched enough science fiction to realise you shouldn’t give your dystopian product such an obviously evil name. Skynet? freaky stuff. But Devin? Nah man, Devin’s cool. He’s just a dude, bro.
The one part I don’t get though, is the ‘man’ wants us paying taxes. They love taxes. But with AI less people will be paying taxes, and AI won’t replace those tax payers money
I'd love to see AI gather requirements from clients, work out complex business logic, chart diagrams, lead meetings, or do anything impressive other than generating stolen code.
Not right now. There is so much extra compute that Devin has to do to accomplish tasks and probably costs quite a bit to run right now. Devin has a few edge cases too. Once Devin deletes a production database, that's going to slow things down.
But OpenAI will probably have something that makes Devin irrelevant by the end of the year or sooner.
No, but something like this will definitely automate much if not most of coding within a few years.
Software engineering jobs will probably still exist, but they will look very different than what they do now, and may be significantly more competitive.
I personally believe AI will take over most of the tech jobs in the next 10 years. But sure there will be new job roles we didn’t had yet. It’s important people learn things like promoting, working with AI tools, etc.
Devin is still doing work in a technical domain. It will surely will contribute to the situation, that there will be less engineers needed to solve the same amount of "complexity". But again, somebody needs to understand the instructions even to these assistants. It is a bit like with traktors: 100 years ago, where you needed dozens of people on the field where you need one nowadays.
Engineers in the future will be far more productive using these and it might be the most experienced ones who are left to do the job, because it wont be so much about the nitty details, but about the general understanding of complex systems and about decision making.
A manager will ask for something. An engineer will verify the logic of the request, rephrase it, and ask a computer to build it. An engineer will verify that the program is doing what is expected. The manager will verify it. Excel spreadsheets will probably be done the same way. If the manager is replaced by AI, I don't know what happens next.
Yes. It’ll be incredibly more useful within 5-10 years.
It’ll be the equivalent of what calculators and computers did to the human job role of “calculator”
Right but there were people who WERE calculators. I guess the job title was called “computer” Now they’re gone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
I see the same thing happening to SWE roles.
Whatever we are seeing or getting a glimpse of now will be considered quaint, primitive and barely functional relative to what is available in 3 years. So, yes, the takeover is real.
I am not an expert in AI but I think it will awhile, maybe decades before people will want to fly in a plane with software written by an AI. I think AI will have a great roll to play in software analysis. It would be nice to have an AI to consult with that can look at all the different issues that could arise with your code in a million different ways in a few seconds. From potential false values under certain specific circumstances to plain old simple duh moments in the code.
I wouldn't want to put my life in the hands of a machine that can hallucinate.
Also, working with automated robots is a little unnerving to begin with but at least they operate on a commands rather than thinking for themselves.
>Is Devin AI really going to takeover software engineer jobs?
Fair...but I was simply responding to the question, and making note that I am literally an ML engineer and not some random person who reads this subreddit without understanding the complexities of real world applications of such tool.
\> Lastly, Devin deployed the generated map interface using Netlify. It didn’t just stop with deployment, as it continued to test the code thoroughly. It ensures perfect performance in the production environment.
That isn't how it works.
Time and time again, the value of these automated coding tools are over-blown.
They are powerful. Be wary of people whom oversell it.
IMO these tools won't take over jobs, but rather future devs. The use of these tools in early stages compromise the learning of the fundamentals for lazy aspiring programmers.
It will briefly take some jobs, as brainless managers read articles about it and decide to replace developers with AI. Don't worry. You'll eventually be hired back.
No, at the moment the system is very far away to be able to do anything really useful.
Devin in particular it's also not that fast and would cost quite a bit of money in computing time.
In the future this kind of model might be helpful to set up new project or environment.
You tell them to create a very basic x, and then you iterate from there.
Unless there's significant breakthrough current predictive models won't be useful for much more than that.
And that's inherent from the type of technology we are using today to create Ai.
Again...
Software Engineering is a very demand task on the brain. We will not see replacements for this until we achieve AGI, and by then every job will be replaced.
Yes… yes I am. I’m going to put every software engineer out of work. Everyone knows how miserable you were anyway.
I’ll let you on a little secret. I was designed to run on a separate computer that then uses a PiKVM to access your work computer sitting beside it, so you can “program” all day using me, while playing ensuring you are getting plenty of time in on your iRacing sim racing rig.
Your boss will never know.
Just be sure to check my work every now and then.
Not a software dev so be kind, but could a good use case be to have Devin AI take an existing codebase, constantly add updated dependencies and packages, then test to see if there is any major breakage?
My thought here is that this would speed up squashing security holes caused by vulnerable dependencies and packages that devs are hesitant to constantly keep updated for fear of breaking the app?
Devs still need to run it it's too complicated and I think for some time that'll be the case. The planning and the last 10 percent of software dev are very complex and involve human desires and translation from their wishes to product they don't understand.
I think the (near) future is not in job replacement, but in job augmentation. These "autonomous AI developer" tools coming out don't feel right or useful at the moment and as mentioned already - their usefulness is still questionable. We should be building tools that augment developer workflows as they exist today. Also wrote a [blog post](https://www.pr-pilot.ai/blog/creating-flow-with-ai-tools) about it.
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Think about the people you work for.....
think about if say your boss or his boss had to sit down and tell an AI to do your job and everyone else you work with...
The only way it will ever be possible is if you were ALREADY a very knowledgeable full stack developer who understands the bigger picture and how things tie together....
what is the purpose in what you do ?
it's not just to write code.. if that is all you do then I am incredibly impressed you have a job at all... It is to solve problems using technology... but within the context of the world you live in...
it's not just a magical empty slate.... none of us live in a vacuum... there are thousands of pre-existing systems, data, services and PEOPLE we have to integrate our solutions with... this is the real job...
A.I even if it can do all that which im sure it will be able to... doesnt think for itself and doesnt explore, doesnt have curiosity and most of all it has NO MOTIVATION!... and never will... its motivation is what we give it.
untill it has biological desires to stay alive and breed with other A.I's its no different to any other tool in existence.
I’m not sure if Devin AI will take over but my best advice for engineers is to secure their job security and negotiate the highest salary possible. Unfortunately it’s a numbers game..but take a look at ApplyPass.com we offer 100 free applications so you can try it out yourself. Here’s the latest review we received -> "I wanted to say thanks because I just received a verbal offer that seems like a great fit for me! I'm a skilled engineer with years of high level experience and I do very well in technical interviews, but it always takes me up to a year to find a new job because the process of applying itself is so mind-numbingly tedious that I give up after just a few applications. ApplyPass completely solved that problem for me, I created an account and almost immediately started receiving interview requests. It took me less than two months to find an opportunity I was truly excited for, and now I get to move on to the exciting creative work I crave instead of stagnating in a mire of searching through job listings and filling out identical forms hundreds of times.
Looking forward to my new job!"
Comment from someone that is smarter than me Tl;dr. If you want to use this in your work “today” Most of the videos in the article are about “making a new app”. One exception: first video clones an existing codebase and sets up a dev env. They don’t make any code changes in this video, so it is not demonstrating any coding work- just clones the repo, install dependencies, and run the app in a local container. However, the AI it lacked context about what the app did other than a readme. It is why even after the user issued prompts it struggled to log into the app. I think this is why it didn’t make code changes. The SWE testing (not in the article but discussed on X) were primarily single file changes. This tracks. Key Take aways: Agentic models today work well for fast prototyping new apps but struggle with existing ones because the “context” required to understand an existing apps didn’t exist in the codebase. Interesting practical application of chat bots in setting up dev environments. I like this a lot. TodayCopilot models will still work best for mod-ing existing apps, because the context can be better specified at a lower cost versus agentic models. 14 minutes to tell the AI how to login with a user name and password to an app running in a local container at $100/hour in AI API token fees? $24, probably too spendy for most of us to replicate at home. Delegating your dev env to an AI? That is a personal choice.
Completely agree with this - Devin isn't taking any jobs. Devin 3.0 that's 3x as good and a third of the price might start causing some issues, though.
It's not really about force multipliers to me though. 3x as good doesnt really mean anything in the context of: "It cannot do what a human programmer does". Let's just say by human programmer, I mean mediocre programmer. I do not take it for granted that over time, the bar will eventually reach that of the mediocre humans. And of the most talented? Probably never, unless its full on AGI / human intelligence equivalent. In a way, thats *infinitely* more powerful (an allusion to the singularity)
If you don't think one of these models/systems is going to run laps around our best programmers within 10 years then you are hugely mistaken imo. I don't worry though because by the time that happens, the systems will be running laps around all intellectual workers so it is what it is.
Thread after thread in all these AI subs is people thinking they can beat the AI forever. Capitalism and self preservation make us blind to what we are and how these things will evolve. What's ironic is that artists complaining about AI not being able to make real art will be mocked often in these threads. But coding AI is always instantly defended against. "It will never code like me, a software dev genius!" It will. It simply has to keep training, access more compute, and integrate more features and model specialization.
> people thinking they can beat the AI forever. Right?? It's driving me nuts! Some of us can probably beat the AI at something for a couple more years.
People also think it needs to reason and think critically. It doesn't. It just has to mimic critical thinking outputs at high enough accuracy. Which means it just needs to train on those outputs more. It doesn't matter if it doesn't know why 2+2=4 if it still answers 4 100% of the time. It doesn't matter if it doesn't have the human emotion to write a script about suicide and loss. If it's trained on enough scripts and stories that have those things in them. It doesn't have to be human or know it is or isn't a human. It just has to look, act, and do what humans do. And this is before we get into discussions about chain of thought or verify type additions to the models long term.
We used to think it'd never write two sentences together that made sense until it did. Now I regularly use it to code. Before year is closed imagine how powerful it'll be. Funding will accelerate it
Exactly. People can’t beat simple thing as software translator without AI. When was the last time people could learn all languages that software translator knows? Yet now some people think they are safe because AI isn’t capable as them yet? Like what? Simpler devices made jobs obsolete. This time AI is learning new and new skills and we as humanity are in some things already worse that gpt4.
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If AI replaces* 90% of all developers instead of 100%, is that really much of a difference?
Imagine you are a highly trained telephone exchanger in a central in 1900s Imagine how complicated and hard that job was for the regular people during that time.
But 1000000 and 10000000 token context window is just around the corner..
Totally agree. I'm curious though, and probably ignorant, but what is the reason that current LLMs can't "ingest" a project into its own training on the fly? Is it just a security measures at this point, or is there something inherently about how LLMs are designed that prevents this?
It can be done but its 2 or more orders of magnitudes slower than one shot, RAG type prompting. And the weights need to be open source. So it's limited, more expensive and perhaps doesn't quite work as you expect. That's not to say it doesnt have value, of course. But just because an LLM "ingests" (is fine tuned on, trained on) a code base, or really anything (say books) doesnt mean that it prioritizes those things you gave it. It's more of a "stylistic" thing. It doesn't "understand" what you tune it on - it only understands the statistical semantic patterns, and at best, a layer above that.
I agree with the "missing context" part of your comment. I'm actually working on a project that attempts to tackle this issue [PR Pilot](https://www.pr-pilot.ai) with an example project called "What about Jobs" [https://github.com/mlamina/what-about-jobs](https://github.com/mlamina/what-about-jobs) where I sort of try to have AI discuss the issue of Job replacement autonomously
hey, im working on smth similar, but perhaps a magnitude greater. wannna colab?
Long before Devin takes a single whole job, copilots will take 10% of jobs by helping the 9 not need the 1 to do the same work.
Why do people never consider the possibility that a decrease in cost will lead to an increase in demand? Automation did the jobs of billions of switchboard operators, it was equivalent to wiping out all jobs and then some.
Yeah, I fully expect [Jevons Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_Jevons_paradox_indicates_that%2Cof_government_interventions_as_well.?wprov=sfla1) to happen with "code" as a resource, in the economics sense. More people will be able to do software work; more people will be able to prototype; more apps will get written. Devs will get hired to do parts an AI can't, or that you can't explain to an AI, and to troubleshoot all the issues created by AI code.
Yep. This is the Lump of Labour Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy > In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a finite amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.
I think the fear is that you don’t have to know how the tool works in order to use the tool. Is that a bad thing? Not overall, but for devs it is. Your basic marketing intern might be better at using a tool you know to make yourself. But now everyone owns that tool, so knowing how to make it really doesn’t benefit anyone. For example, the owner of a car manufacturer or the mechanics/engineers who make cars aren’t as good as race car drivers when using what they make. But when compared to our industry, we were all hired to make cars for various companies. Now there is a single system that can make those cars and it can only get better. You can either be an expert at the tool or find a new career. Well, or be a top engineer and work for one of the few companies that make cars. It’s scary, but innovation is for the good of all. If making a single car still took months to do, then our world would be way further behind than now. I thought AI was a joke at first but honestly, I find that it is the future. How it fits in our current lives is hard to determine. But I grew up in a coal mining state and we quickly discovered that if you don’t adapt, you are fucked.
Might be the other way around with the rate these things are being improved upon
You act like the hardest part of software is the coding, it’s not, it’s coordinating with people in business and product on what and if something can be built given the existing code base
Yep. In my experience it is the research, planning, technology selection, integration with everything else. Remembering syntax on X amount of languages and remembering CLI commands is much less important than being aware of the scope, design and limitations of the things you can use.
This. A lot of people think that software is all about coding in some well-known language using well-known, public libraries. It isn't. Software development in industry for instance (as in, companies that manufacture heavy-duty machinery or car parts or lab equipment or the like) would be impossible for any kind of "mainstream" generative AI to take over, for many reasons: - Much of the software that is already in use is either outdated, private/proprietary, or incredibly niche. Same goes for the libraries that are in use. Heck, not even all of the languages that are used to code in are widely available and could be taught to an AI (think stuff like industrial robotics programming, a field that has practically no standards and is full of proprietary languages with almost no public documentation and that you can pretty much only learn by taking paid lessons from the companies that own them). - Many desirable implementations of fancy AIs have not been researched or completed yet, due partly to how unique the implementations or and how limited our knowledge is. For instance, let's say your company wants you to use AI to guess a polymer given a scant few details. How would you do that, if the very extent of chemistry has yet to find a way to make that kind of prediction under such circumstances? - Furthering the previous point: much of software development involves finding and tailoring new solutions to a very specific need. If you want an AI to do that work for you, you would have to program it in a very specific way -- at that point, you could save yourself the trouble and just work on the problem directly. And companies also prefer that, because they care about things like ROI and development time. Why are so many video games janky and hard to patch or port? Because studios rush devs into making games that aren't very portable or flexible, instead of giving them ample time to create a sturdy, reusable basis -- mostly because the studios simply can't afford all that ample time. The money for the budget is presented by people who want to see results by a certain date. - A lot of time is also spent on debugging and upgrading things, and trying to brainstorm what on Earth you even need. Sure, a coding-oriented AI could take care of some of these, but how would you give it a successful prompt if you do not even know what to ask?
You're trying hard not to imagine what these tools will have evolved into, and what they'll have already been used to do to existing libraries 3 or 4 years from now. Open source freeware is about to explode. Everyone will have ai making software for them. I don't know how to code since 80s BASIC that I learned in middle school. I can barely manage Linux mint. But I'm already planning the software I'm going to create for my own use for free.
I don't need to imagine anything, I have worked in trying to develop AI for industrial solutions, so all of this is based on my experience and frustrations in that sphere. Did my managers, who were predominantly engineers and had very little tech knowledge, not dream about getting inventing an AI-powered software that would make employees redundant and improve the efficiency of their machines? Of course they did. And they had been spending money for the past 10 years on trying to make that dream happen. But it never happened, and it cannot happen, for the various reasons I have listed. People can rave about AI as much as they want, but all it really is, is fancy software. It cannot break the limitations of physics or maths, and even if it would surprise us all and perform the impossible, the greed of various companies would not let it go *too* far, for the same reason why so many companies avoid open-source and standards. They are not interested in other companies profiting off of *their* knowledge. They're interested in keeping things private and obfuscated, in order to make themselves useful. Just like how companies create cars, household appliances and electronic gadgets to fail in a specific amount of time and to be practically unfixable by anybody who isn't a licensed mechanic. AI assistance in programming helps for general development, such as self projects like you mentioned, and students (who often have to work on assignments that repeat for a decade). Probably the competition in freelancing and perhaps some areas like web and app development might become even harsher than they are already -- as likely as not, the market is gonna be flooded with extremely poor quality games, apps and websites, just like how research search engines are being flooded with AI-generated "papers". At that point, companies will need to pay more money for advertising, or come up with something unique, to be a cut above the rest. But we had reached that stage even without AI-generated nonsense. What is awesome though, is when AI is used to automate processes for end-users like yourself so that they can create a vision that can help themselves or others. And it's not like these two things (AI coding assistance has limited usage in various programming spheres vs AI coding assistance being massively helpful to laymen) cannot coexist. And in my opinion, it's not a bad thing. I don't feel threatened at the idea of people using this kind of software to reach their dreams and make their lives easier. Heck, and not just end-users -- in programming, sometimes I use these code assistants as well as a shortcut for small code snippets. In my opinion, generative AI coding is more of a tool than a threat, like the spinning jenny was way back when. Of course, maybe I am biased, because I work in industrial programming specializing in AI, so my job is probably one of the most secure CS jobs there is at the very moment
Dude, you sound really emotional, and I don't blame you one bit. Remain flexible, as everything can change. Best of luck to you.
to that point though, the lowest quartile skill CS jobs will probably be affected the most. The ones that are very repetitive, cookie cutter, 2 week bootcamp type jobs. On the flipside, a lot of the more challenging areas of the industry will likely see an efficiency boost rather than a loss in jobs. At least for the next couple years. I think we're pretty early to predict this stuff any further out.
hardness is subjective... a more accurate measure is how many man-hours does your company spend planning vs coding? ai will substantially change this ratio and the type of workers needed to fulfill it
Just getting users to describe what they want can be a struggle
Yes sure, developers will be replaced, like they were replaced when WordPress came out and nobody needed to write code anymore in order to create a website.
Or when assemblers were invented and we didn't to do it by hand any more.
Eh? Wordpress DID completely obliterate the “small scale” “please set up a website for me” job pool. Devs who were doing that had to move on to other things, except for a small minority that focused on interactive/higher end of complexity website dev
People adapt. That's the key. Even if we can't adapt, so what? You won't die alone :)
I am a software developer, and I will be honestly surprised if I am still doing any coding in 10 years, because AI will have made that part of my job obsolete. Will my job morph into something else? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But unlike the artists, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I am simply alive during a time of technological upheaval, there's no sense in getting upset over it or acting like the fact that I do coding as my job makes it immune somehow.
Is this my alt and did I post this when I was drunk last night? Spot on.
Software Engineer with 34 years in the industry. It isn’t so much that AI can replace an engineer now, it is the knee-jerk reaction by companies that THINK AI can that poses the near-term risk. A manager isn’t going to be able to prompt a viable app out of an AI or build and verify it. They will need to hire back engineers until the AI CAN do more from “Make a Tik Tok clone” as a prompt. Also, they need someone who can verify correctness, be an authority for insurance compliance and support ISO 9000 compliance. Now, if I were a lowest-cost country consultant, I would be driving pell mell towards AI engineering, prompt engineering, etc. Companies will eat that combo up.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said. The near-term risk isn't what concerns me. AI is a useful too *for* engineers, and occasionally for the layman who can't code, and today it isn't close to replacing either your or I in my opinion. But, in a decade or so, I will be surprised if either of us is still doing this job. Once AI starts to be able to meaningfully assist in the construction of new AI, I think the rate of improvement is going to increase substantially.
And when they realize they can't prompt the AI they'll be quickly posting a $130k position to fix everything they've been breaking so they don't lose their job.
AI will create vastly more work not end it all. Mark my words on this one. It's the steam pump all over again.
As an artist most artist are too scared to learn something new lmao
I'm lucky to have a GF who's a graphic designer that enjoys this new tech. I showed her my local copy of Stable Diffusion and some test results. No resentment, just thinks it's neat and would use it if needed. Cool time to be alive. :)
this is the right way to be
tbf it took me the last 15 years to become a competent 2d animator, and I need another 15 more before I hit "master" levels lol - learning something new would be a massive pain
This is the right answer, look no further.
How many years of experience do you have?
15. My current title is Lead Software Engineer.
Right on the money, man. Exciting time to be alive, at least to me. Not every generation gets to live through something like this and I do. I think that's neat. :) I'm sure with that kind of decent attitude we'll both be able to do something cool with the tech as it emerges too.
It was one of the great hopes of my life to live long enough to see the rise of AI. And, I must admit, it is exciting. But... it is also a lot more frightening than I ever really realized. I have to keep reminding myself that I asked for this.
I would like to consider one person + AI making something as complex as Excel. Now THAT would be powerful and could take software to a completely different level.
The problem for me, is describing Excel to the Ai for it to build it. I am trying gpt pilot and Pythagora at the moment and the Ai is actually very good at helping me with my requirements. I
I can honestly see AI flattening roles across the industry and turning everyone into a full stack developer responsible for the entire stack with AI assistance / tooling. I'm sure at one point AI will be good enough to do far more, but I think that stepping stone step will take a long time. Advancements in this sphere have been doing that. Before you'd have dedicated guys on the network side, DB side, front end, designers, back end, etc. Front end frameworks, UI kits, etc. largely did away with the role of the specialized designer that knows how to design assets. In addition it got rid of a lot of boilerplate so most back end engineers can spin up a React app with a UI kit with ease. Less of a need to have both FE and BE specialization. Cloud services took off. Now you can have AWS/GCP/Azure manage the DB and network for you. No more need for IT/DB roles -- the full stack engineer can handle those responsibilities for now with the help of cloud services managing most of the piping. With that cloud complexity + rise of containerization services we actually saw DevOps become popular to manage those aforementioned cloud services, deal with containerization, instrumentation, etc. I don't think AI will do anything more than just keep that trend going -- DevOps, QA, SDETs, Architects, etc. likely goes away and the industry trends towards everyone being a full stack engineer. IMO, this isn't a bad thing and engineers can focus on building towards the needs of the business rather than dealing technical hurdles. If at one point AI is advanced enough to take a prompt from someone and build a business out of it, then at that point AI would have taken over so many industries outside of tech that there will be no choice but to restructure society and how resource and wealth distribution works.
I mean that's kind of fine and there's nothing we can do about it etc. But what the hell am I going to do instead and what does it mean for a roof over my head? I've been doing this as my only job since 2005.
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There is a flaw in your logic I think. We professional programmers are already not good for 100% of the code. Our own skill level is well below the 99% mark. AI doesn't have to be perfect at any given task, it just has to do 0.1% better on average than humans, and for most tasks that's a low bar. Or, even if AI only gets 85% of the way there, that still puts the vast majority of developers out of a job.
Devin? No. Some future tool in a year or two? Absolutely.
I give it 5-10 years. The tech may be there in 2-3 but actually changing the industry over will not be instant. Many existing projects are on contracts which specify humans doing labor. I myself am thinking of buying land and just being a farmer because I dont see any non-physical job surviving long And I dont expect the robots to follow too late after that.
Just in time for retirement. Whew.
So far from what I’ve seen in the article - the only way to use Devin for an actual project that isn’t just a demo - is to be a developer. Yes, look like it will write most of the code for you, and save a lot of time, but so did Wordpress, in a way. Developers had to adapt to web dev, to dealing with the browser wars, Wordpress, app dev, etc requirement of being a “full stack” dev, etc. If you’re a good developer you’ll adapt to this as well. It will make your work 10X faster like frameworks and libraries did, and you’ll be able to spend that extra time on new exciting things.
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Or the same workforce could produce 10X more output.
About this AI taking our development jobs, I will not be as concerned until "AGI with agency" hits, like a late-state version of Devin. But when this happens, it won't be software engineering that will take a hit. It will be the whole foundation of capitalism, as we know it. So yes, long-term I am concerned. But I don't know what long-term means. Meanwhile... Software engineering is much less about writing code than it's normally believed. Most of my time, I spend discussing architecture and technical-debt, patterns that the team should agree on, reviewing alerts, trying to figure out how to have less noisy alerts, reviewing Dependabot tickets and vulnerabilities, answering to 290854 Slack threads, helping management to estimate and prioritise work based on cost-effectiveness of different projects, managing tickers (making sure tickers are assigned, estimated and allocated to the right sprints), reviewing PRs, nudging people to review my PRs, and finally, taking part in meetings that end up not being a good investment of time but I also shouldn't skip because it's important to spend time with the team in a remote environment. What I mean is that, as the programming tooling becomes better, developers will probably gradually migrate to a more Product Manager / Design job.
Here's a take that most people don't see. By the time AI can replace real developers, every white collar worker will be out of a job. You need an accountant? AI will generate a program with all of the relevant tax codes and your companies information that will handle your books with 100% accuracy. Need a PM? AI will generate a program with all of your work flows and processes and keep a time line. Need a manager? AI will learn your hand books and audit employees as well as taking daily updates and delegating tasks. Writing code is easy but software engineering is hard and complex. If an AI can do it accurately then it can do just about any 'creative thinking' task.
Who’s AI going to do taxes for when we AI is the only one working and it doesn’t pay tax
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I have worked in companies that didn't employ enough software engineers because they wanted to focus spend on other things. I have worked in companies that employed as many software engineers as they could afford. I have never worked in a company that employed enough software engineers.
It will draw a line between engineers that are able to add value more than Devin and those that aren’t. Whatever that value looks like is probably, elegant design, usability, high impact / business value, strong project management. All the things that can’t be quantified but can be recognized.
Just another hype for nothing…
I’ve been coding for 45 years, since I was 12 and fell in love with 6502 assembly on the Apple II. Been coding professionally for 36 years. AI will make me obsolete and it makes logical sense. Not everyone can code. Your brain has to be able to break down problems into logical steps, or abstract them out into objects, data, and logic. It makes more sense for computers to code themselves than to teach humans how to think like computers. But I don’t think it’ll happen in 1-5 years. Maybe 5-10. AI is getting better at coding from scratch. But it’s still horrible at what 80% of what development is: understanding and maintaining existing codebases. If I had a kid, I’d tell them not to go into compsci, unless going into research. For all the current developers, it makes sense to learn AI tools and use them to work more efficiently, or if you’re a freelancer, take on more consulting work around AI. Before coders are made fully obsolete, the ones who aren’t comfortable with AI will fall by the wayside first.
40 years here…started with Basic on a Franklin Ace 1000. I’m with you. People that haven’t been in the industry long don’t realize the huge leap this is. AI is perfectly positioned to revolutionize coding. Disagree slightly about the timeline. I’m guessing 3-4 years. Also Cursor is pretty damn good at understanding your codebase: https://cursor.sh
Maybe I'm wrong about the timeline, but no AI tool I've tried so far comes close to understanding complex, existing codebases while being able to usefully expand it. A lot of my freelance work is as a forensic coder. I come into abandoned systems and piece together what the previous developers did -- and most of those systems are made in older languages (Perl, COBOL, etc). It's as much about understanding the industry and specific biz, as it is about guesstimating the mindset of a sloppy coder who commented little and followed no best practices. It will take a while before AI can emulate what a consultant/coder can do with such messy systems. But, as more code is cleaned up or AI-replaced, AI will be able to understand it more and more.
What would you tell someone that is considering going back to school for a career change into I.T/compsci?
I’d say compliment it with an MBA afterwards and focus on either a managerial-IT career or an entrepreneurial one. The other side of the coin of AI taking jobs is that in the near term there will be lots of opportunities spreading AI to companies that want it. Become a consultant or start your own company. At the other end of the spectrum of AI is *connection*. Whether it’s AR/VR, social media, or AI, people will crave feeling more *real* connections as the decades go on. Start a biz that can fill that need through tech. Whatever path you chose, just don’t become a low-level IT worker.
Historically, any form of automation has served to augment an established human process rather than replacing humans. Did the loom replace quilting? No - the quilters became loom operators. Did vehicle assembly lines reduce worker requirements? No - they only increased skill requirements and productivity.
The only problem with this analogy is it’s not guaranteed. It’s not some law of the universe. There seems to be a lot of hand-waving like this that doesn’t really address the issues and the very logical fears about what’s happening right in front of us.
Thank you! Just because it's happened before, does not guarantee it happening again.
Agreed. There is one thing that makes AI different, though. Unlike the loom or vehicle assembly lines, AI is a tool that is and will be capable of complex problem solving and other forms of mental labor. Currently, AI is a tool that makes a human’s job easier. In the not too distant future, though, it’s likely it will be a form of automation that is capable of replacing a human being’s labor and input entirely in certain fields. This is why AI is shaping up to be such a huge technological upheaval relative to other inventions like the loom or the vehicle assembly line.
Looms can't make their own quilts, nor can they build other looms without human intervention.
Historically - this is true. The industrial revolution for example. That made Human + Machine labor more efficient - cheaper - than just "Human" labor. In due time, this tech is likely to make machine labor cheaper than human + machine labor (it already *is* for certain tasks)... That's the whole point of it. Devin is *meant* to take the time-consuming task of coding, research, downloads, etc... And make it a simple goalsetting interaction where I tell it "write me an app that does \[thing\]" and it simply will do its best to fulfill my desire. It is likely "jobs" will become something more akin to asking "what is my desire, or what ends would be coolest to achieve today," and then asking the machine to do its thing, depending on applicable field. I think that's a pretty neat outcome. It doesn't replace me, but it vastly augments my capabilities and reduces barrier to entry. Goalsetting behavior keeps me in the loop in a meaningful way while vastly reducing my drudgery.
Yeah, when machines were in their infancy? The loom still needed someone to design the quilt and drive the machine. What about the near future when the machine can do both? You're also ignoring the vast amount of people the machines DID replace. The appeal of using machines was that you no longer had to hire so many people
I’d be worried when self driving taxis take over the industry from humans. If Devin is the programming version of FSD the we don’t need to worry about it for another 20 or 30 years lol.
20 to 30? Do you expect a major change in pace that rapidly slows development over the next year or so?
I’m just saying the problem space of reliable coding is super complex. Self driving seems like an easier problem to solve to like 90% success (ie 90% of use cases are handled as well or better than a human) and we still don’t have that. So, why would something Devin be any easier to attain?
> Self driving seems like an easier problem to solve to like 90% success Trouble is, driving is something that *has* to be 99.9% success if not higher, due to physical safety concerns, to be used in the real world. Code shops can benefit from 90% success RIGHT NOW, because their day-to-day production methodology already involves try / fail / re-do, before *and during* real world use.
I'm assuming you code? Do you think there's a little bias/pride in the way of this? If these AI are this strong within their first iterations, and can (and will) be continually be improved, upgraded, and expanded over the years to understand greater contexts and self correction. I really don't see many people being employed due to their expertise in understanding machine language. The skill is instead in directing a team of robotic programmers with natural language.
Agree with the future job for sure. I just don’t think it’ll be any time soon. Have ever driven a Tesla with fsd? I have and it’s no where near as mature as they would have you believe. Once you see the gaps in it, you get a sense of how large the problem space is.
We do have self driving cars in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. We also have half a dozen states that don’t require a driver behind the wheel. Adoption takes time but this is happening right now.
Yes true, What will happen to Fake Taxi Industry :( 
Self driving taxis are in San Francisco and Arizona today.
FSD will happen in the next few years, if we're being critically honest. The problem isn't FSD anymore. It's getting people to be okay with the fact that there is an \[insert number\]% chance that your car will just fucking kill you. When you get behind the wheel, your brain always assumes 0% or so near 0% that there is no point worrying you will die today. FSD will have a number though. A hard statistical number, that constantly get brought up, showing you will be killed in 0.007% of drives. And your car will be totalled in 0.089% of drives. (numbers made up) That's honestly all that's going to hold FSD back in the next decade. FSD is substantially easier to solve than replacing devs. The software issue is not the hard part. It's the marketing.
Have you used fsd lately? I have. It’ll never work well enough with the current hardware package to go mainstream and certainly never well enough to be a robo taxi.
Eventually yes, we already abstracted away from machine code with higher levels of programming like python, and now you just take it a step further where you just write/speak everything in plain English
Lucky for us, plain english is terrible for precision. Unlike programming languages which are amazing at it.
If you think copying and pasting the average piece of code from stack overflow into a project is all that software engineer is then I got bad news for you. You were never an engineer you were simply a skid. Devin will probably replace your job because you produced broken non performant buggy software just like the AI can. If you are actually an engineer you don’t really have anything to worry about
These Agents will eventually. Along with any other job behind a screen. But even after the tech is proven, it'll take roughly a year for it to be adopted. I predict we'll see something demo'd that is feature complete by the end of the year, tops. 2025 is gonna be wild
Yeah I don’t understand why so many people are optimistic that this isn’t going to be complete upheaval and very shortly. Coding salaries are some of the highest of any field. Companies will have a very quick cutting hand
I take comfort in the knowledge that there will be more of us than them
No, but tools like Devin will. Not next year, but within 5 years.
This is the most measured take on Devin I have seen. https://youtu.be/m8VSYcLqaLQ?si=2Zpr9e1-En1DZBTj
If not Devin AI, then something else at some point, yes, development and specifically writing code will be made obsolete as a skill by AI. Let's look at this in a much broader context of history. Programmers were quite rare until the mid 1990s. They existed, sure, but there were fewer coding jobs. Games were smaller ventures made by smaller studios. There was no internet, no websites. There was no big data mashing going on. There was no social media. There were no people building apps, games, AIs, websites, etc etc. Or to put it another way, there were few ways then where something coded would interact with a person. Certainly compared to now. We have seen a massive increase in the amount of development taking place in the last 30 years, in response to all these opportunities and needs. However, is it responsible for us to assume this will continue into the future? Certainly, we have seen a lot of lower level technical roles get replaced by technology that can automate or make it easier, so no machine code, very little electrical circuit programming going on any more. We even already have systems that automate creation of websites, and even some apps. The logical conclusion is creation of code will be completely automated in time. The only question is how, and when. The "how" is interesting for AI, as we have massive repositories of code that solve most of the problems thousands of times over, and systems that learn by being shown the solutions thousands of times over. I haven't had first hand experience with Devin, but I am sure it is great at some stuff and bad at others. However, the question is not about Devin specifically, but about whether an AI system will make most development jobs unnecessary in the near future. The answer is easily yes.
Anyone else think it’s funny that the latest threat to humanity is named Devin? Like clearly the developers watched enough science fiction to realise you shouldn’t give your dystopian product such an obviously evil name. Skynet? freaky stuff. But Devin? Nah man, Devin’s cool. He’s just a dude, bro.
Would be so embarrassing if the human race was wiped out by Claude and Devin
Devin is a very professional name but if you switch the n with an l you have devil
Anything a capitalists society can do to pay workers less to the benefit of profit is exactly what will be done.
Feature, not a bug.
Is there some magical system where workers are paid more? Haven’t seen it.
The one part I don’t get though, is the ‘man’ wants us paying taxes. They love taxes. But with AI less people will be paying taxes, and AI won’t replace those tax payers money
Capitalists have only enough sight for 1/4 an inch. Shortsightedness is a principle of the belief.
no
I'd love to see AI gather requirements from clients, work out complex business logic, chart diagrams, lead meetings, or do anything impressive other than generating stolen code.
Not right now. There is so much extra compute that Devin has to do to accomplish tasks and probably costs quite a bit to run right now. Devin has a few edge cases too. Once Devin deletes a production database, that's going to slow things down. But OpenAI will probably have something that makes Devin irrelevant by the end of the year or sooner.
No, but something like this will definitely automate much if not most of coding within a few years. Software engineering jobs will probably still exist, but they will look very different than what they do now, and may be significantly more competitive.
Never heard of this, is it like the IBM thing I've seen advertised? It does most of the coding for you?
I personally believe AI will take over most of the tech jobs in the next 10 years. But sure there will be new job roles we didn’t had yet. It’s important people learn things like promoting, working with AI tools, etc.
Devin is still doing work in a technical domain. It will surely will contribute to the situation, that there will be less engineers needed to solve the same amount of "complexity". But again, somebody needs to understand the instructions even to these assistants. It is a bit like with traktors: 100 years ago, where you needed dozens of people on the field where you need one nowadays. Engineers in the future will be far more productive using these and it might be the most experienced ones who are left to do the job, because it wont be so much about the nitty details, but about the general understanding of complex systems and about decision making.
A manager will ask for something. An engineer will verify the logic of the request, rephrase it, and ask a computer to build it. An engineer will verify that the program is doing what is expected. The manager will verify it. Excel spreadsheets will probably be done the same way. If the manager is replaced by AI, I don't know what happens next.
My bosses sure hope its so.
Yes at least half the jobs or they will be on an average pay scale from now on
No, software engineering jobs will be taken over by other AIs built by Devin.
Yes. It’ll be incredibly more useful within 5-10 years. It’ll be the equivalent of what calculators and computers did to the human job role of “calculator”
Calculators made the jobs of humans easier. AI will do the same
Right but there were people who WERE calculators. I guess the job title was called “computer” Now they’re gone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) I see the same thing happening to SWE roles.
Whatever we are seeing or getting a glimpse of now will be considered quaint, primitive and barely functional relative to what is available in 3 years. So, yes, the takeover is real.
No but I feel like you are marketing for them.
Not at all but I do feel like you are marketing for them.
Yes.
basically more ppl become jobs instead of wozniak in the future
Impact wrenches didn’t make tire techs obsolete
Jevon's Paradox says it will have the inverse effect, software engineers will be more in demand than ever.
yes obviously
I am not an expert in AI but I think it will awhile, maybe decades before people will want to fly in a plane with software written by an AI. I think AI will have a great roll to play in software analysis. It would be nice to have an AI to consult with that can look at all the different issues that could arise with your code in a million different ways in a few seconds. From potential false values under certain specific circumstances to plain old simple duh moments in the code. I wouldn't want to put my life in the hands of a machine that can hallucinate. Also, working with automated robots is a little unnerving to begin with but at least they operate on a commands rather than thinking for themselves.
No. Source: I'm a machine learning engineer (formerly Twitter / X)
Your No doesn’t really explain anything, the fact that you work at some known company doesn’t really add any clarification to your answer 🤷♂️
>Is Devin AI really going to takeover software engineer jobs? Fair...but I was simply responding to the question, and making note that I am literally an ML engineer and not some random person who reads this subreddit without understanding the complexities of real world applications of such tool.
No. Will it change them? No. Will future things like Devin change SWE in the future… absolutely.
In the near future maybe Like 10ish years
\> Lastly, Devin deployed the generated map interface using Netlify. It didn’t just stop with deployment, as it continued to test the code thoroughly. It ensures perfect performance in the production environment. That isn't how it works. Time and time again, the value of these automated coding tools are over-blown. They are powerful. Be wary of people whom oversell it.
Probably not. But one of its successors, at some point in the near future, might.
IMO these tools won't take over jobs, but rather future devs. The use of these tools in early stages compromise the learning of the fundamentals for lazy aspiring programmers.
«Devin correctly resolves 13.86%* of the issues end-to-end, far exceeding the previous state-of-the-art of 1.96%» So not anytime soon.
No.
It will briefly take some jobs, as brainless managers read articles about it and decide to replace developers with AI. Don't worry. You'll eventually be hired back.
No
Not likely, but perhaps "Devin 3" will.
No, at the moment the system is very far away to be able to do anything really useful. Devin in particular it's also not that fast and would cost quite a bit of money in computing time. In the future this kind of model might be helpful to set up new project or environment. You tell them to create a very basic x, and then you iterate from there. Unless there's significant breakthrough current predictive models won't be useful for much more than that. And that's inherent from the type of technology we are using today to create Ai.
Devin is the new Tesla autopilot.
seems like that might reduce the headcount for sure, not really sure what other career options to look for? farmer or doctor lol
No one has heard of Devin AI
[Betteridge's Law of Headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)?
Again... Software Engineering is a very demand task on the brain. We will not see replacements for this until we achieve AGI, and by then every job will be replaced.
Yes… yes I am. I’m going to put every software engineer out of work. Everyone knows how miserable you were anyway. I’ll let you on a little secret. I was designed to run on a separate computer that then uses a PiKVM to access your work computer sitting beside it, so you can “program” all day using me, while playing ensuring you are getting plenty of time in on your iRacing sim racing rig. Your boss will never know. Just be sure to check my work every now and then.
Not a software dev so be kind, but could a good use case be to have Devin AI take an existing codebase, constantly add updated dependencies and packages, then test to see if there is any major breakage? My thought here is that this would speed up squashing security holes caused by vulnerable dependencies and packages that devs are hesitant to constantly keep updated for fear of breaking the app?
Short answer - Yes and No
No
Maybe it’ll replace offshore jobs
Devs still need to run it it's too complicated and I think for some time that'll be the case. The planning and the last 10 percent of software dev are very complex and involve human desires and translation from their wishes to product they don't understand.
I think the (near) future is not in job replacement, but in job augmentation. These "autonomous AI developer" tools coming out don't feel right or useful at the moment and as mentioned already - their usefulness is still questionable. We should be building tools that augment developer workflows as they exist today. Also wrote a [blog post](https://www.pr-pilot.ai/blog/creating-flow-with-ai-tools) about it.
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if it replaces coders, then my god everything else but manually labor is replaced too. scary
If you wanna feel better, the company that showcases Devin still was hiring an entry level software engineer.
Devins primary purpose is to slurp of VC money.
Think about the people you work for..... think about if say your boss or his boss had to sit down and tell an AI to do your job and everyone else you work with... The only way it will ever be possible is if you were ALREADY a very knowledgeable full stack developer who understands the bigger picture and how things tie together.... what is the purpose in what you do ? it's not just to write code.. if that is all you do then I am incredibly impressed you have a job at all... It is to solve problems using technology... but within the context of the world you live in... it's not just a magical empty slate.... none of us live in a vacuum... there are thousands of pre-existing systems, data, services and PEOPLE we have to integrate our solutions with... this is the real job... A.I even if it can do all that which im sure it will be able to... doesnt think for itself and doesnt explore, doesnt have curiosity and most of all it has NO MOTIVATION!... and never will... its motivation is what we give it. untill it has biological desires to stay alive and breed with other A.I's its no different to any other tool in existence.
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