Coding With Devin: My New AI Programming Agent

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

We onboarded four new engineers at Every this week. 

The onboarding process was what you'd expect. I gave them access to our GitHub account so they could download our main code repos. I was peppered with the usual questions. 

“What's the password to this account?” 

“Where do I find the API keys?” 

“Do you have any particular coding conventions you follow for this kind of task?”

There were some things, though, that were strikingly different about these new engineers. They welcomed being interrupted by me. They let me watch their computer screen in real time, so I could easily step in if they were making a mistake or got stuck. Also, they worked suspiciously hard. When I rolled over in the middle of the night to check my phone, I could see them still coding at 3 a.m.

Weirdly, they were all named Devin.

In case you have been living under a rock without access to X (if that’s you, congrats!), Devin is an AI software engineer. It’s an agent equipped with access to a full suite of developer tools—a browser, a command line interface, and an editor—as well as to your codebase. You can assign Devin small tasks like bug fixes or large tasks like prototyping an entirely new app from scratch. Devin will plan the work and keep you updated as it goes. You can watch along with everything it does and step in if you need to.

I’ve been using Devin for about a week, using it to do everything from fixing annoying little bugs that I haven’t had time for to building the first version of an app I’ve had in the back of my mind. Devin is almost impossibly futuristic and oddly familiar at the same time. I started with a few questions: Will it code for me so I can spend more time at the beach? Will it 10x Every’s engineering output at no extra cost? What does it mean for the future of software?

I’ll have a full review of Devin soon—with step-by-step details of how I used it and comparisons to other coding agents—but here are my first impressions.

Devin is oddly familiar

Working with Devin is familiar because it feels like adding a few junior engineers to your team. 

You toss them tasks, and they’ll get started with enthusiasm. To your mild surprise, code is getting written without your involvement. But it takes a long time to do the work, and they’re likely to get stuck every once in a while unless you’re keeping close tabs on them. They’ll often come back with a functional solution that, on closer inspection, isn’t optimal.

Just like working with junior engineers, working with Devin requires a skill set. You have to learn what it’s good at and what it fails at. You have to learn how to write tasks that it can understand and when to step in. You also have to learn how to actually step back and trust it to do the work, even if it won’t get the work done in the exact way you would’ve done it.

Hiring junior engineers doesn’t mean you get to spend all of your time at the beach. Instead, it means your time is spent delegating tasks and getting in the weeds as a pair programmer to help your reports get unstuck.

With junior engineers, this can feel like a drag, but with Devin, it’s a little different because Devin is almost impossibly futuristic.