Devin highlights two types of software engineers - Human and AI

Forget those coding assistants you've been playing with—a whole new breed of AI is entering the game. Cognition Labs just announced Devin, the world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer. Devin doesn’t do suggestions or auto-complete; Devin takes on whole software projects from start to finish.

What's going on here?

Cognition Labs, a new AI company, launches with Devin—an AI agent for software engineering.

What does this mean?

Devin is the next level in AI coding tools, capable of planning complex tasks, learning as it goes, and even fixing its own mistakes. It's like having a tireless coding buddy with its own workspace.

Cognition Labs is evaluating Devin on a new benchmark made of real-world coding issues. Devin clears up a whopping 13.86% of them without any human assistance, compared to 2-5% across the plain GPT-4 and Claude models.

If we go by the demos, Devin’s a builder: Need a website, an app, or even its own AI model fine-tuned? Devin's got you covered. It handles everything from design to deployment and actively collaborates with you. Devin doesn't just help you write code, it diagnoses and fixes bugs autonomously—even in massive, open-source projects.

The team behind Cognition is cracked. They have 10 IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics) gold medals, more than the number of people in the team. They have raised $21 million Series A led by Founders Fund.

Why should I care?

Again, we don’t do fear-mongering (fear is the mind-killer). But there are two things to realize here:

a) Some jobs will be lost, and believing that you’ll be fine if you don’t get used to the new tools is delusional.

b) Software engineering is not dead, but changing. We’re under a shift where AI takes on substantial development work, changing how software teams operate.

For builders, this is the signal that AI agents over these plain models can give you massive improvements in real-world tasks. I’m excited to see Devin for non-programming roles too.