Cognition Announces Devin, The First AI Software Engineer!

Recently, we reported about NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, talking about the revolution artificial intelligence (AI) will bring that will render programming a non-vital skill soon.

He also voiced his belief that humans should switch their focus to more valuable subjects like biology, education, manufacturing, farming, etc., as AI can take care of coding.

Now, it seems that day may not be that far, as New York and San Francisco-based AI startup, Cognition, comes with an announcement that could propel AI coding capabilities!

So, what did Cognition announce? Let’s explore!
 

What Did Cognition Announce?

 

• “Today we're excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer,” read Cognition’s post on X that announced the company’s new product.

• The post was broken into 5 parts, the first of which summarized the software, saying, “Devin is an autonomous agent that solves engineering tasks through the use of its own shell, code editor, and web browser.”

• The first post also included a video of Scott Wu, the Co-founder and CEO of Cognition, explaining the software and what it’s capable of.

• The remaining 4 parts highlighted Devin’s capabilities accompanied by videos displaying those capabilities.

• As per its website, Devin is described as the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer, which is “a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review.”

• Cognition even ran performance tests for Devin, evaluating the tool on SWE-bench, which is a dataset that tests a system’s ability to solve GitHub issues automatically.

• As per the company, its results were far superior to the previous state-of-the-art agent, which saw Devin correctly resolving 13.86% of the issues end-to-end beating the previous best of 1.96%.

• Cognition’s Devin will allow engineers to focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals.

• Currently, Devin is available in “early access” with calls for people to join its waitlist.

 

What Are Devin’s Capabilities?

 

• The multifaceted features of Devin bring with it some unique and powerful abilities, which include training and fine tuning its own AI models, building and deploying apps end to end and learning to use unfamiliar technologies.

• Devin can also autonomously find and fix bugs in codebases, address bugs and feature requests in open-source repositories, contribute to mature production repositories and complete the setup and context gathering process required by only being provided a link to a GitHub issue.

• Ahead of these, Devin comes with numerous capabilities, which includes planning and executing complex engineering tasks that require thousands of decisions, thanks to advances made in long-term reasoning and planning.

• The tool can even recall relevant context at every step and learn along the way and fix mistakes.

• Cognition has also equipped Devin with common developer tools, including “the shell, code editor and browser within a sandboxed compute environment.”

• Devin can also collaborate with users, report on its progress in real-time and accept feedback.

• Cognition included videos displaying its capabilities on its website.

 

What Did Cognition’s CEO Say?

 

• Talking about Cognition’s Devin, Scott Wu, the Co-founder and CEO of Cognition, said, “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”

• [Contd.] “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.”

Do you think Devin will be the next big AI tool? Do you think it will revolutionize the software engineering industry?
 
Let us know in the comments below!