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Engineers at freshly launched AI startup Cognition Labs have released Devin, an AI tool that can autonomously code, complete engineering jobs on Upwork, and even tune its own AI models.
Devin takes the premise of GitHub and Microsoft's Copilot developer tool one step further, as it's able to finish whole projects on its own without human intervention.
In one video, Cognition Labs CEO Scott Wu shows how Devin users are able to view the AI tool's command line, code editor, and workflow as it moves through various steps to complete coding projects and data research tasks. Once Devin receives a request, it's able to scour the internet for educational materials to learn how to complete tasks and can debug its own issues encountered during the engineering process. Users are able to intervene if desired, however.
"Teaching AI to be a programmer is actually a very deep algorithmic problem that requires the system to make complex decisions and look a few steps into the future to decide what route it should pick," Wu tells Bloomberg.
"It’s almost like this game that we’ve all been playing in our minds for years, and now there’s this chance to code it into an AI system," Wu adds.
In Bloomberg's tests, Devin was able to code a basic Pong game and create a website from scratch in under 20 minutes. Non-technical folks could use Devin to develop their own projects, and more time-consuming, cumbersome tasks could be offloaded to the AI for it to solve.
It's a bit ironic, though, that software engineers are releasing an AI tool that's designed to essentially replace software engineers.
"It’s less like an assistant helping with code and more like a real worker doing its own thing," computer scientist Silas Alberti tells Bloomberg based on his experience using Devin.
The internet jab "learn to code," previously posted in Twitter reply sections under news of media industry layoffs, has now become even less relevant in the AI era. There's certainly a chance Devin may be used to outsource work or load engineers with more tasks to be completed overall, essentially removing some lower-level engineering jobs from the market.