Do you remember the server dilemma that had a group of Silicon Valley elites pulling their hair out last Christmas Eve? At that time, the Cognition AI team was struggling with a complex data server, trying every possible method without success. Just when everyone was about to give up, someone suggested trying the yet-to-be-officially-released AI coding assistant, Devin. And guess what? Devin magically solved the problem with ease! It simply deleted a system test file that the team had overlooked, and the server's indicator light changed from red to green—truly miraculous!
Devin's "magical operation" astonished the entire team, and they realized that the software engineering field was on the brink of a revolutionary transformation. A year later, Devin has become an indispensable assistant for programmers, capable of discovering and fixing bugs, updating code blocks, migrating code across different platforms, and even autonomously creating and executing plans based on simple commands like "clean up this codebase." Unlike tools like GitHub and Codeium that only provide code suggestions, Devin is an autonomous agent theoretically capable of independently writing, fixing, and migrating code without human involvement, completing entire projects typically assigned to developers.
Behind Devin is a "dream team" of genius programmers—the founding team of Cognition AI. This team can be described as the IOI gold medal "harvesters," with three founders, Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, all of whom are IOI gold medalists, reportedly amassing a total of 10 IOI gold medals! Scott Wu, a serial entrepreneur, created an AI-driven social networking platform called Lunchclub before founding Cognition AI. He has been a math prodigy since childhood and achieved the highest ranking of "Legendary Master" on Codeforces (a programmer community website). Steven Hao has extensive experience in AI systems, graduating from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics and previously serving as a Senior AI Systems Engineer at Scale AI. Walden Yan is a promising Harvard graduate. This team of talented youth developed Devin in just six months and secured $176 million in investments from Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, skyrocketing the company's valuation to $2 billion!
Well-known companies like Ramp, MongoDB, and Microsoft have begun using Devin, with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott even praising Devin as an extraordinary tool at the annual developer conference. However, Devin is not without its flaws. A YouTube blogger with 35 years of software engineering experience replicated a promotional video of Devin completing Upwork tasks, only to find that Devin's actual performance was far from what was showcased in the video. Some have also questioned Cognition AI's claims, suggesting that Devin can currently only handle predefined tasks, such as cleaning up existing code.
Despite its shortcomings, Devin still holds immense potential for growth. Cognition AI is continuously enhancing Devin's capabilities, such as enabling it to deploy subordinate AIs to assist with tasks, forming an "AI bureaucratic system," similar to a "legion" of junior engineers. This "management" model may unsettle some programmers, but Scott Wu believes Devin can help companies initiate more projects and allow human programmers to focus on more meaningful work.
AI-generated code has begun to reshape the entire industry. Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that over 25% of new code written at Google is generated by AI. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted that GitHub's code autocomplete tool accounts for 40% of this year's revenue growth. AI coding has become the most funded use case in the GenAI sector, with startups in this field raising over $1 billion in the first half of 2024, and it's projected that AI coding revenue will exceed $4 billion by 2029.
The future of AI coding is exciting, but it also poses a crisis for millions of programmers worldwide. Does the emergence of Devin mean that the profession of programming is about to disappear? Scott Wu believes that massive layoffs are unlikely to happen, as the demand for programmers currently exceeds supply. Nevertheless, the wave of AI coding has already arrived—programmers, are you ready?