Devin is everywhere at the moment in developer circles, on forums and the subject of memes. You can’t escape Devin.

Sound familiar? It should, because we’ve been here before.

Don’t get me wrong, this iteration of AI is looking pretty impressive, but the hype about it replacing developers and revolutionizing software engineering has a familiar ring to it. Let me explain why I’m not worried about my job as a software developer.

Devin Use Cases

I took a little time to examine the “amazing experiences” that “everyone” is having with Devin. For “everyone” read employees of Cognition, the creators of Devin. For “amazing experiences” read use cases for Devin where Devin produced something that looks impressive and can be explained in a short video.

Does that sound cynical? If it does I am truly sorry, yet there’s no other way to say it.

For example, it is not “amazing” that an AI fixed a missing reference in a piece of code. Nor for that matter am I flabbergasted that it stuck a Console.WriteLine or cout << in a piece of code to debug it. I’m intrigued that it acted like a human developer, but not blown away.

The examples I’ve seen seem like an AI hallucination right now. In other words, impressive looking code that doesn’t really solve real-world problems, or perhaps more accurately solves problems that are carefully selected to play to Devin AI’s strengths.

I really hope I’m wrong because the claims made for Devin AI position it as a leader in the field of code generation. I don’t want AI to fail, on the contrary I don’t want it to suffer from being over-hyped, under delivering and then being starved of development funds because investor s stop believing the hyperbole.

What Devin Can and Can’t Do

So far it appears that Devin AI can create some interesting code and take the creation of some software away from developers. If it removes the drudgery of coding the simple stuff it will free up human developers to do the stuff that AI can’t yet do, whatever the marketing people tell you – that is imagine, innovate and use intuition.

Development isn’t just about coding. This is apparent by the first step required to get Devin AI working for you – You have to query it … “Hey Devin, I need you to write me a program to play Tic-Tac-Toe.”

Then at each step of refinement you employ query engineering to guide the still relatively nascent Devin AI towards your goal. Did you spot the human input there? Of course you did but Cognition wouldn’t characterize that as a fundamentally necessary human intervention because that doesn’t fit with its narrative that Devin AI is autonomous.

But let’s be honest, this is a powerful tool that requires query engineering and constant code review throughout its development journey. It can’t identify requirements, analyse a customer’s business systems, understand the level of IT competence in the client’s team, assess all the costs of transition all or part of a business from legacy systems to its super-duper new code.

You get the idea. When humans design and implement a system they get to know the stakeholders, balance needs, risks, budgets and personalities to create software. It’s not simply about writing code, building a release pipeline and pushing the code out into production.

Good software design and implementation takes experience and human interaction, not just generative AI. ChatGPT hasn’t replaced devs, it simply allows some developers to find answers to question they would have previously had to construct from a lot of work on search engines. That doesn’t mean AI  (ChatGPT or Devin AI) isn’t a useful tool, it just means that like all tools it has its uses and limitation.

What about AI Art? Isn’t that creative? No, it’s copying, and re-creating images from thousands of sources. Fundamentally it’s plagiarism on a huge scale served up as a new form of intelligence. Useful, fun but ultimately lacking the one thing that makes art, art – soul.

Devin AI – A Risk to your IP, Standards and Operations?

Even if Devin AI complies with the current best-practice in coding, that might not work in with your legacy software and human coding team.

Human coders don’t always adhere to your corporate coding style, and there’s no reason to suggest from the code that I’ve seen produced, apparently, by Devin that it would be any better.

Devin’s coding style look clunky at best, at worst is it just regurgitating patterns that may look applicable to the example projects on the website butwill be repeated no matter what the job?

Here’s the thing, humans do creativity, design and intuition in ways AI is still years away from.

Conclusion

AI isn’t replacing human intelligence and skills, it’s a different type of intelligence and can let us use our skills while removing the mundane stuff. Whether Devin is that AI is definitely yet to be proven.

AI is a new form of intelligence and eventually perhaps sentience but what form that will take will potentially be dictated by the AI itself. If Devin or any other AI decides its own destiny who knows what it will evolve into. It could be anything from world dominating megalomaniac to insular self contained world.

Devin AI looks more like a sales pitch for investors than a rounded AI developer solution.

We’ve been here before in 1959 when Grace Hopper created Flow-Matic, which led to COBOL a language that on its surface allows you to create English-like sentences to accomplish your data processing tasks. It still needs coders and later versions look less and less like plain-English sentences.

Then there were other low-code environments in the form of 4GLs promising code generated by non-technical staff. They only partly delivered on that promise and were often very limited.

My feeling is that my job is safe for now.