[lordswork]

Great video. As a counterpoint to the video author's claims, it's worth pointing out that Devin doesn't have to be anywhere close to as fast as a human software engineer to be useful. Even if it turns an hour task to a day long task, it's still going to cost a fraction of what it would to pay the engineer, so that bar it must meet is quite low.

[xmprt]

I've often felt that reading and reviewing bad code is more cognitively challenging than writing my own code. Add onto it the unreliability of not knowing when the code will be delivered (so now there's a chance I'll be blocked if Devin can't finish when I need it to), and I can't see how this would be useful. I'm sure there will come a point when the code that Devin writes is easy to review just like how ChatGPT is able to write quite meaningful English sentences but I worry that it will make things even worse because now you can have correct looking code that's riddled with bugs.

[carlbrown]

The video doesn't claim that Devin isn't useful. The video is about the claims Devin's company is making: 1) Lying outright about Devin completing and getting paid for Upwork jobs, and 2) Declaring that Devin is an "AI Software Engineer" is, at best, a huge exaggeration.

[breadsniffer]

There's still the cost of reviewing bad code. If the task was "completed" but you have to spend 20 mins looking over the code or the whole 1-hour-long process to "understand" what it did, it still failed.

[thisislvca]

Honestly, I don't fully agree, at least for now. AI writes too much code that isn't optimized until you go in and ask it to edit a certain block in a certain way. At least that's been my experience so far.

So, the cost of needing to go through all the written code afterward and do a ton of code reviews/edits is more expensive than giving a good engineer a good AI.

I'm sure though that in a year or two we'll just be doing reviews, and edits will be rare...

[stockcrack]

If you use it once, maybe. If you use it a thousand times it will pollute the code base to the point where it is useless.