Cognition, an applied AI lab based in the United States, has unveiled what it claims to be the world’s first AI software engineer. According to its creators, the AI agent, named Devin, has successfully navigated practical engineering interviews conducted by prominent AI firms.
Devin is also said to have completed real jobs posted on Upwork, an US-based freelancing platform.
Cognition AI just introduced Devin, an autonomous AI agent that can write entire software projects based on prompts.
In demos, Devin autonomously completed real jobs posted on Upwork by itself.pic.twitter.com/sgCPpljhE0
— Brett Adcock (@adcock_brett) March 17, 2024
“Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review. With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems, and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals,” read the company’s official blog post.
The AI agent is equipped with advanced capabilities in software development, including coding, debugging, problem-solving, and more. Devin utilizes machine learning algorithms to continuously learn and enhance its performance, adapting to new challenges as they arise. Put simply, Devin can construct and implement applications from start to finish, and it can also train and refine its own AI models.
Devin is capable of planning and executing intricate engineering tasks that typically involve thousands of decisions. This capability is made possible by Cognition’s advancements in long-term reasoning and planning. According to the company, Devin can retrieve pertinent context at each stage, learn autonomously over time, and rectify errors as needed.
On the SWE-Bench benchmark (a benchmark for evaluating large language models on real-world software issues found on GitHub), Devin correctly resolved 13.86 per cent of the issues without any assistance compared with the 1.96 per cent unassisted and 4.80 per cent assisted of the previous state-of-the-art mode.
Microsoft’s marketing of Copilot as a developer productivity tool is a genius play. Startups marketing their tools as developer replacements will struggle with the fact the users of the software are the ones you want to replace.
Copilot gets you a raise. Devin gets you laid off.
— Dare Obasanjo🐀 (@Carnage4Life) March 14, 2024
Although the company has detailed Devin’s capabilities, some experts express concerns that the AI software engineer might encounter challenges with intricate requirements or scenarios that depend on human intuition and creativity. Additionally, AI tools like Devin raise apprehensions about potential job displacement.
Nevertheless, some individuals believe that Devin could serve as a valuable partner for numerous software engineers, opening up new opportunities for collaboration between human creativity and AI.
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