The race to create the world’s first artificial intelligence software engineer just got a new entrant — and they may already have won.
AI software engineer: Computer code underpins virtually everything we see and do on our devices, not to mention a large and growing number of jobs and businesses, which means the people who write that code—software engineers—play a key role in shaping the digital world.
But what if anyone could write their own code without first spending months or even years struggling through bootcamps and tutorials? What if it’s as simple as describing the app or website they want to build to an AI software engineer?
Several startups are racing to make this vision a reality, and one of them—Peter Thiel-backed Cognition Labs—believes it’s already crossing the finish line with Devin, “the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer.”
“Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate.”
Cognition Labs
Introducing Devin: On March 12th, Cognition came out of stealth to publish a detailed blog post about Devin that included several demo videos showing how users can easily push the AI to build and deploy applications, debug existing code, and even train fully new AIs.
“Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally willing to build alongside you or independently complete the tasks you review,” Cognition wrote. “With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can pursue more ambitious goals.”
reaction: The Twittersphere was quickly to the weigh-in on Devin, with several tech leaders praising AI — Rowan Cheung, author of the popular AI newsletter The Rundown, for example, said he did “the most capable autonomous coding agent [he’s] saw.”
Cognition has started making Devin available to select users on demand, and those who have had the chance to test it seem to be impressed.
Bloomberg reporter Ashley Vancefor example, he said it only took Devin about 5-10 minutes to build a website from scratch and noted that the AI ”seems well ahead of other coding assistants in many aspects.”
Looking ahead: Exactly how How Cognition managed to jump ahead of the rest isn’t clear — it has yet to work out how its AI software engineer works, but it says it plans to release a more detailed technical report “soon.”
As for when it plans to make Devin widely available, that’s not yet known, so another company that trains AI to code — like Magic AI — could potentially beat Cognition to market.
However, regardless of who gets there first, if any of these companies manage to develop a real AI software engineer that anyone can use, it could be one of the most powerful AI applications the world has ever seen.
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