Coding With Devin: My New AI Programming Agent

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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.