We Can Beat Devin | Mender.AI

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2024-04-03 06:00:07

On March 12th, AI startup Cognition Labs came out of stealth mode with $21M Series A round, a state of the art SWE-bench score, and a demo that has captured the imagination of the AI coding space, even calling into question (for some) the very future of the Software Engineering profession.

"Can we beat Devin?" was the question soon posed by a Discord server of that name, gathering 1,000 users within days of Devin's announcement!

Cognition Labs advertises Devin as "the first AI Software Engineer." Considering the climate of grandiose AI claims, this marketing decision is understandable, but not even on April Fool's Day do we abide by that terminology.

Still, it does seem they have created something impressive and important. We ought to call it something. We suggest the following distinction:

Coding Assistants operate as editor plugins offering auto-complete style suggestions during development. Examples include GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and the Open Source Continue.dev.