Devin Has Exposed a Major Issue with Software Engineering
Cognition Labs recently released the first AI software engineer and it has caused developers to fear their job security. I've even seen posts on X about high schoolers changing their major for college just because of Devin. I understand the fear here, based on the general fear regarding AI taking jobs and Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang claiming people shouldn't learn to code only a few weeks ago, but a lot of this is hype. As someone who works in machine learning and software engineering, I'll let you know software engineers’ jobs are safe for a little while longer.
Devin is the next logical step for AI assistance with programming after Copilot. It amazes me how worried developers are about Devin automating aspects of their job when the community has heavily enjoyed Copilot doing the same. Did we not expect Copilot and similar tools to get better?
The supposed most techno-literate group of society has become the most fear-based regarding AI advancement. There are certain tasks AI is good at and they'll replace those tasks within jobs first. This isn't exclusive to software engineering. There are aspects of all jobs that will be automated soon and many more that will take a longer time for AI to do so. By the time software engineers are fully replaced, there are many other jobs that will already have been replaced. Why software engineers are the group panicking most about AI taking jobs, I will never understand.
