Cognition AI, founded by coding experts Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, recently introduced Devin, the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. The development of Devin was backed by $21 million Series A funding led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Devin’s abilities exceed those of OpenAI and Microsoft’s CoPilot, as it can construct a complete software project from prompts, rather than output individual bits of code.
Videos released by Cognition AI demonstrate Devin’s wide-ranging capabilities in many different software development and engineering tasks. One demonstration showed its ability to learn and adapt from information to execute new technologies successfully. This adaptability was illustrated as Devin read a blog post and then proficiently executed ControlNet on Modal to create images embedded with hidden messages.
In addition, Devin autonomously developed an interactive website, managing the entire project lifecycle from feature incorporation to deployment on Netlify. Another highlight of Devin’s capabilities includes identifying and fixing coding errors without human intervention. This was demonstrated as Devin debugged an open-source competitive programming book. Plus, Devin notably set up and fine-tuned a large language model autonomously, making it a viable tool for AI model training.
The SWE-bench benchmark, a test that challenges AI agents to solve real-world issues from GitHub’s open-source repositories, was used to assess Devin’s abilities. It displayed significant improvement by resolving over 13% of the end-to-end issues, a major step up from the previous state-of-the-art, which only solved approximately 2%.
The creators believe that Devin’s capabilities signify the future of software development, where AI tools will perform complex software engineering tasks, and manual programming will be virtually obsolete. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, predicted a future where everyone becomes a programmer because AI will be creating computing technology in human language.
However, this leads to valid concerns about AI replacing human jobs, especially those that require creativity. Some suggest that the solution would be to balance effective AI use while cultivating critical thinking and creative agility. Nevertheless, the launch of autonomous AI software engineer Devin hints at a future where AI continues to revolutionize traditional professions.
