Devin

I mentioned in the past How I Use ChatGPT as a supporting tool and with the advent of Devin there's been some noise about the future. I generally agree with the sentiment of AI being a gold rush right now, I'm somewhat looking forward for this to be over. It's fascinating to see breakthroughs in the field and it looks like there are plenty of players (with bigger companies up there for obvious reasons).

CongnitionAI announced the firs AI Software Engineer getting a lot of attention. From some of the claims and demos I can tell most jobs are still safe. Forgive me for not having a source for this, but I saw a poll where folks with 1 year of experience or interns were the most concerned. I definitely see where they are coming from, but I like to think that the only companies who would replace an intern with an AI Software Engineers are not leading companies or simply don't know how to hire. I'm not saying the worry is misplaced, I think some will try to leverage this technology to produce an output at a much lower cost.

I don't believe in generative AI replacing people, even if they have little experience. I'm sure some in the industry will try to do that, which is why the open jobs will likely shrink in numbers. If we take juniors or interns for example (the group that seems to be the most worried), what they can be trained to do goes far beyond what any AI can achieve today and 10 years from now. Engineering is not just about completing a coding task, it's a complex role. Among other things, it requires strong soft skills, good communication, relationship building, leadership, ...

If you've read any of my previous thoughts on system design or if you are familiar with problems software architects try to solve, you soon realize that Devin might only provide limited support. Think about all the details you would have to provide, the evaluation of trade-offs, and most importantly the final decision. It's plenty of work that can be achieved faster with AI in a supporting role, but not driving the ship. Interns building a career at a company, will hold a lot of context over the years that will be hard to share with an AI. The only way I can see that happening is by feeding every meeting, decision, documentation, and whatnot to an internal AI. That's a big risk to take.

Thoughts

I honestly only have scattered thoughts around this topic. People afraid of companies cutting costs by using AI rather than hiring humans should not despair, you most likely wouldn't want to work in a place like that to begin with. This doesn't mean you should go about your day as nothing changed. Study, practice, and prepare as much if not more than you did before. Remember that good companies hire people first. Better companies value growth starting from internships. I haven't been at a company that had a strong internship program as much as MongoDB (granted I haven't been around a lot of companies, but my bias was reinforced by talking to a lot of other interns). Some that joined the intern program in the past are now awesome leaders or ICs! So yeah Devin, you're doing impressive work and you could assist us, but long term, you can't lead us.