As a software engineer, Devin seems very overhyped.
Rather than being a new set of capabilities, I think it’s a repackaging of current capabilities into a new UI.
The AI code assistant space is already very crowded. If this company came out and said they were making another code assistant, no one would have invested in them because there are already great code assistants on the market. Claiming that their product was an “AI software engineer” was the ONLY way for them to get funding and attention.
Also, some of the claims they’ve made involve smoke and mirrors. They claim “it passes the top tech company coding interviews”. It can do that because it’s trained directly on the solutions to the Leetcode questions that top tech companies give. Google search could pass the top tech company interviews by that standard.
People seem to vastly over estimate how much of software development is doing simple code tasks. Only 20% of software development is writing code and maybe 5% is doing simple code work that Devin was doing in the demos. Generative AI seems to have fundamental problems with reasoning, counting, and precision that I suspect will hold it back from being good at software engineering for a while longer.
As a software engineer, Devin seems very overhyped.
Rather than being a new set of capabilities, I think it’s a repackaging of current capabilities into a new UI.
The AI code assistant space is already very crowded. If this company came out and said they were making another code assistant, no one would have invested in them because there are already great code assistants on the market. Claiming that their product was an “AI software engineer” was the ONLY way for them to get funding and attention.
Also, some of the claims they’ve made involve smoke and mirrors. They claim “it passes the top tech company coding interviews”. It can do that because it’s trained directly on the solutions to the Leetcode questions that top tech companies give. Google search could pass the top tech company interviews by that standard.
People seem to vastly over estimate how much of software development is doing simple code tasks. Only 20% of software development is writing code and maybe 5% is doing simple code work that Devin was doing in the demos. Generative AI seems to have fundamental problems with reasoning, counting, and precision that I suspect will hold it back from being good at software engineering for a while longer.