The Devin Debate: Engineering Evolution or Hype?
Gain clarity on AI in Engineering in just 3 minutes and 658 words
I’m still coding and so are you.
How did that happen?
I’ll tell you.
When people jumped on the “Devin” bandwagon a week ago, for a moment, they forgot what it means to be an engineer.
Let me tell a story from my early freelancing days.
Elance (now Upwork), 2015.
My fresh account had two 5-star ratings. I really needed the reviews because I wanted to leave my job so badly.
We were hanging out with friends on a Friday evening when I got an email:
Do you understand what i need?
The client thought I was kidding. He needed a tool to convert data in Google Sheets into a different format.
I bid <1 day for this and like $10 for the job.
That night, I sent him a new Google sheet that did exactly what he wanted.
I wrote 0 lines of code.
That night, I understood what it meant to be an engineer.
Why it matters?
We are paid to solve problems.
I got my $10 because I solved a problem in a way that was:
cheap
simple
maintainable
Anyone can write a bunch of spaghetti code, a complicated architecture for a simple problem, but what if all the code does is support our overengineered solution?
That’s what we did a couple of years ago!
Team of 10. I was working on a fully-fledged microservice architecture, more precisely, on authentication between different services that gather sensitive user data.
We had GCP, monitoring, CI/CD, alerts, and around 7 microservices built to scale.
We were so ready.
And we had 150 users.
Hey Devin, can you build me a microservice architecture for a Todo app?
Certainly, here’s the …
It’s both amazing and scary if you understand the implications.
But what do you think a Junior Software Developer who saw 1/10 of engineering will think:
AI will replace me
AI will increase my value
I don’t have the data on this, but I’d say beginners have a harder time passing interviews and getting into companies than people with experience.
People who have spent hours on Upwork or Elance and built a portfolio will have a 10x easier time getting the next assignment.
But is there anything new in this?
Worry and experience relate.
ThePrimeagen made an excellent point by correlating years spent in the industry and how worried you are about Devin taking your job.
Being a famous streamer is great, right? You have thousands of developers ready to conduct a mini-study in seconds.
Where could Devin help us?
But I can’t wait for AI developers to become a thing. I already see 3 key areas where it could help engineers:
Refactoring
I’ve spent years refactoring business-critical parts of software, mostly UI.
What did this look like?
Once you got the gist of it, it was repetitive and boring.
80% of the work was the same, but we didn’t know anything better, and someone had to do the job.
Prototyping
Sometimes, I would love to see how a solution would look with full-stack TypeScript vs. TypeScript on the front end and Go on the backend.
Right now, you can either start from scratch or find a GitHub template. But there’s one problem with these: they are opinionated.
For example, the front end might use SCSS, but you want Tailwind. Or it might have CRA, but you want Vite. Sometimes, switching out those parts doesn’t make sense, so you create another template.
Tests
Open the projects page and create two new project entries with milestones. Check possible outcomes.
I wish this could be a prompt that generates integration tests in my framework of choice. I’d skim the integration tests and see if they could be improved.
…
Overall, I have high hopes for Devin, and I would like to believe it wasn’t just a marketing stunt.
There are a ton of things where engineers could use some help.
Do you think technologies like Devin will negatively impact your career?
Do you use AI at your job?
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that makes you wonder if I even need this for my 100 users. Probably not.
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I love the pragmatic place from which you approach it, Akos!
Not sure if you knew the name, but you just described "the Lindy effect". The longer something has survived, the longer it will survive in the future. That's why people with a lot of experience or people with big audiences are expected to last longer than people just starting out.
Rather than going to the extremes of ignoring AI or losing hope we'll maintain our job, we have to adapt and use it as a new tool
I loved that overview, fun and to the point :)
I think though that the AI programmer will involve, and the instructions will be at a higher level than the example you gave. There is nothing stopping us from explaining the problem and not asking for microservices - and once we get used to it, the usage will change.
I completely agree on the tests though 🙃