Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim
theregister.com
theregister.com
An engineer not reading the docs and wasting a day chasing their tail because of that. Yes… how unrealistic…
Move over "bankrupted by runaway cloud spending", it's time for "bankrupted by AI agents trying and failing to complete a task indefinitely".
If B always submits PRs and they always go straight to merged in prod, then B knows what he's doing
Republicans don't want to fix immigration, otherwise they have nothing to complain about.
What???? Yeah, trivial bugs maybe.
Even because most "hairy" bugs (and those are the one that count by the end of the day) manifest themselves not in obvious ways, but only under some hard to predict set of pre-conditions and input data. And let's not even get started on threaded/asynchronous code.
Yes, I’ve worked on bugs that have taken weeks to fully resolve. But those are rare.
Apparently we've all been working with Devin for years.
It gives you an answer that looks fine but lacks important details etc
For example, to try to find out whose IP they plagiarized, and how badly we're scrod.
Or, for example, to find out how they generated so much code they don't understand at all, and how badly we're scrod.
Or, for example, to find out why they wrote a criminally negligent security vulnerability or data corruption, and how badly we're scrod.
Or, for example, to see what engineering assurance they "hallucinated", and how badly we're scrod.
Quickest way to get AI engineers kicked out of the company will be to patch them so they push back against unrealistic goals from management.
Seriously though, where is the AI C-suite? The AI BoD? At least with an AI BoD you don't have to worry about them doing backstabbing financial shenanigans for their own self-interest at the expense of the company.
Whereas when I was a professional Ruby programer, everything was nice, because the community really cared about making developers lives nice.
ignore them
That I've been hearing this for several years straight without any exponential increase in the capability of the technology makes me assume this is false.
> it just feels like I'm in an industry that is so hostile to its own inhabitants.
You are in a historical period where industries are largely monopolized and are notably hostile to those who earn the largest salaries.
> because the community really cared about making developers lives nice.
The community isn't going anywhere. AI can't replace our need to connect with and achieve large advancements with each other. The golden era of computing has been dwarfed by commercial concerns, but it has not, and will never disappear entirely.
What other industries suffer from this to this extent?
There are actual rules in medicine about the devices, medicines, and procedures you can and can’t use. You can’t just have a doctor use a device or medicine that hasn’t been proven to be as good or better than the existing standard of care (unless you’re specifically participating in a clinical trial). So the amount of BS you can get away with is limited in that way.
However, medical providers are also under a lot more financial stress than most startups, and less constrained by market pressures, so there’s a lot more incentive for straight up corruption (e.g. ordering unnecessary expensive tests).
I have a family member who genuinely hates SWEs and the "lazy dorks" in tech, but, it's like, Buddy, your wife works in tech... You worked at a tech startup that failed...You are now trying to start a startup with only an AI writing the software. You are in tech! But, since he can't read or write code and just delegates to an AI, it's somehow different in his mind. It's honestly exhausting to be around.
I used to think I'd be part of the solution... but these days it really feels like nobody in the industry is willing to admit how bad it is.
Maybe it's just because I live in a small town on the East Coast but it's brutal out here in the sticks. It's gotten to the point where if someone asks what I do for work, I just say "computer stuff" and wave my hands around like I'm typing on an imaginary keyboard. It's vague and odd enough that there aren't any follow-ups or rebuffs.
But I think the hatred would be less if the average person actually felt like we were providing value proportional to our salaries, not just having salaries proportional to our intelligence.
They also do not accurately understand the cost of keeping things running, which is a problem not isolated to tech.
EDIT: wow I'm a special kind of dyslexic tonight. Got east and west mixed up. I live in Boston roflmao. I was picturing you living in northern cali or something >.<
Or it may just be the high school mentality carried over into adulthood. In other words envy. The "dorks" are supposed to stay miserable. Not do what they like and earn good money from it.
No surprise it's seen different from being a founder or a manager. Our culture respects these occupations more. They may be in "tech" but they are for sure not the "lazy dorks" the developers are.
I've thought a lot about it and I believe it's because tech is one of the few careers that has a ton of freedom. In normal job markets we can switch companies easily. We can go raise money and start our own companies etc.
Most other careers are do x, y, z then you might have your choice of 1 or 2 employers that you then are mostly stuck working for.
I think a lot of people are very threatened by that freedom.
How can I as a software engineer by trade help make this world is the question?
The talent pool would be improved if not everyone felt they had to become a techie just to live a comfortable life. Though I will say the resurgence in interest in the trades is a good sign, even if it also often comes with a certain rejection from education in general...
Idk, lots of big problems and questions here.
P.S. I'm sorry your brother can't be happier for the good things in your life.
There are so many barriers and tons of nepotism in the trades.
I'm sure its much worse today with all the wall st builders dominating the game. You can't even buy lots in the master planned communities sprouting up everywhere unless you can build out an entire subdivision.
I hate people that think that the solution for unequal outputs lie on making other people worst to come to their level.
Also SWE often just have the worst attitudes and egos to rival surgeons who think they’re gods. Real talk: a lot of them are working on shit that doesn’t matter to anyone and is a solution looking for a problem. SWE are very often not producing anything of value to anyone. The entire startup industry is predicated on the hope that you’ll exist long enough to get a giant payday from the big boys.
The person who fixes your toilet did real work with a tangible benefit. The person who takes care of your grandmother by cooking/bathing/shopping for her is doing real work that has a tangible benefit. They don’t get paid anything comparable to a SWE who is making Uber for dogs or the 15th messaging system that Google will shut down after a year.
Maybe SWEs are overvalued for their output compared to other people.
I do a lot of manual work at home and even at friends for free. I can build a house, I can solder stuff, fix my own plumbing and yes, it is hard work, but most of those things don’t have a big barrier of entry. So, supply and demand apply.
Recognizing homelessness as a problem and feeling threatened and disgusted by it is not an exclusivity of software engineers, and if you talk to blue collar folks you’d be surprised to find that they see the problem in a far more heavy handed way than our average googlezen. Compulsory rehab would create frissons of indignation in our average habitats while being absolutely popular amongst construction and factory workers.
But I still think the downstream effect is an attitude in many SWE that divorce them from reality. Most people don’t get paid incredibly large sums of money on work that amounts to a gamble, with high risk and high reward. The failure rate for small businesses isn’t trivial but they’re not playing in the same part of the casino as tech. Tradespeople aren’t afforded the luxury of building entirely speculative things that are going to be dead within a year or two. People expect their homes and the things in them to have a much longer shelf life.
My point about seeing some of the things Google/Amazon/Apple folks have said regarding the homeless is that those are very much people working in the industry that made Seattle/SF impossible for “normal” people to afford to live in. There are many reasons people become homeless and why they stay that way but being literally priced out of a place you may have been born and raised in and lived for decades is a very special kind of fucked.
That said, if the capital side of things wasn’t the runaway nightmare monster it was, SWE probably would and should be making less than they do now on average.
It costs more to be poor. Closing the gap absolutely means raising the minimum standard of living but wealthy inequality absolutely goes both ways and it isn’t going to get better unless things contract on both ends. Raising things up at the bottom does mean lowering things at the top. The impact isn’t linear though.
Obviously the real world has other ideas but there should be less people with more money than God and that does mean less money for SWEs. But the face value of money and the absolute value of money aren’t the same either.
But I also don’t things are going to be getting better anytime soon so it’s somewhat of a moot point. The incentives aren’t aligned and unfortunately the people who are playing an idle game are going to squeeze every last cent out of the people who can still afford to buy food to feed their family, but only just.
While I can say a lot of things, see if you can look at some of these influencer videos/reels on normal people’s timeline, the content is bizarre and goes maximum effort to garner envy, by reducing the entire profession into “learn to code and make millions”. For you/me, we recognize this bs immediately, but for normal people, it is painful when you see that someone is making 350k+ and having time to push out reels all day while also travelling and collecting sports cars/bikes and promoting bill gates/jeff bezos revenue generation per hour.
I am unsure if I ever saw such bizarre influencer behavior of other professions.
Oh, yeah, that’ll go well.
I’m not convinced it’s hate, but a general misunderstanding of what a SWE does. If you haven’t spent a long time doing it, you might be under the impression it’s mostly about producing lines of code, not trying to figure out what the ticket says should to be done, what can be done and what actually needs to be done and who’s the person(s) that might have the answers. Writing code is the easy part.
Ignore it. It is marketing. There have been about ten “this makes programmers obsolete” crazes in the last 50 years (it actually goes back even further; COBOL was initially marketed this way!)
SWE-bench: https://www.swebench.com/ :
> SWE-bench is a dataset that tests systems' ability to solve GitHub issues automatically. The dataset collects 2,294 Issue-Pull Request pairs from 12 popular Python repositories. Evaluation is performed by unit test verification using post-PR behavior as the reference solution.
Multi-SWE-bench: A Multi-Lingual and Multi-Modal GitHub Issue Resolving Benchmark: https://multi-swe-bench.github.io/
It would be like if the Apollo program was just 10 grads.
So far, he says it’s a net win. Saves him time.
From the sessions I observed, Devin even came back with some really good follow up questions for clarification.
Sample size 1.
They aren't generic and the output needs to be monitored.
Not sure if it will impact jobs really. Most likely, I think it will impact the number of people entering the field only. I suspect software will be a very good career in 2035.
Update: Yes it is