Artificial Intelligence is developing at a rapid pace, and every day, there's something new in the AI space. But most of the news fails to turn heads. This isn't one of those. Meet Devin, a fully autonomous AI software engineer from Cognition.

There are so many AI assistants out there that can help with coding. What's special about Devin? It's autonomy! Most of the AI coding tools now are meant to assist you with coding. Devin, Cognition claims, is capable of handling projects itself, just like a skilled software engineer on your team. It can build alongside you or handle tasks independently.

What Can Devin Do?

Devin has an impressive range of capabilities. Cognition has equipped Devin with common developer tools that any software developer would need to do their job. This includes the shell, code editor, and browser in a sandboxed compute environment.

It has a similar interface to chatbots where you can chat with it and give it prompts in natural language.

When a user gives it a prompt, it can create a step-by-step plan to solve that problem. Not only can it plan a task requiring thousands of decisions, but it can also execute it by using the coding tools at its disposal. It is capable of recalling the context at every step, and even learning from its mistakes and fixing them along the way.

It can also report its progress in real-time to the human user and accept any feedback from them.

It can learn unfamiliar tasks, build and deploy apps end to end, autonomously find and fix bugs, and even fine-tune its own AI models.

Devin can also fix bugs or solve feature requests on GitHub, solve real-world jobs from Upwork, and contribute to mature production repositories. All in all, its capabilities are remarkable.

Cognition evaluated Devin on the SWE-bench test, and it has performed remarkably against competitors like Claude-2, SWE-Llama-13b, and GPT-4. It can resolve 13.86% of issues end-to-end, while Claude-2, SWE-Llama-13b, and GPT-4 scored 4.80%, 3.97%, and 1.74%, respectively.

Source: Cognition

Devin's Availability

Devin is currently not available publicly and is only available in early access as the company is ramping up its capacity. If you want to try out Devin for software engineering tasks, you can reach out to the Cognition team for hiring Devin.

You'll need to fill out this form and get on the waitlist to access Devin. If you send a problem that can be directly sent to Devin to solve, you'll get off the waitlist sooner!

While Devin brings promise with it to accelerate software development, it also brings concern in tow about the potential impact on job displacement in the tech industry. While Devin is still meant to assist human engineers and not replace them, there's no doubt that its autonomy poses a real concern. However, it might be too soon to say something since the tool is still to be tested in real-world applications.