New AI software engineer could soon challenge Microsoft's GitHub Copilot

As quickly as OpenAI came onto the scene with its ChatGPT LLMs used to help power Microsoft’s open-source developer community, it may be usurped by a new AI firm providing a full-fledge synthetic software engineer.

The artificial intelligent start up Cognition, which is partially funded by Silicon Bay titans Peter Thiel, Elad Gil, and Tony Xu, took the wraps off its new model dubbed Devin. Devin is designed to be a fully autonomous AI-powered software engineer versus OpenAI’s Copilot partnership in GitHub which merely suggests pre-generative snippets of code to assist developers.

Furthermore, Devin can be deployed to manage developer projects from start to finish while spot checking and addressing bugs along the process as well as issue updates to code based on established roadmaps.

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT model leverages deep learning and large language models to generate human-like text based on prompts from users, Devin operates by ingesting user prompts to formulate actionable developer plans with specificity.

Devin’s operational parameters enable it to not only write code but troubleshoot project-oriented coding issues, update project progress while also updating developers on project progress in real-time.

When pitted against other established AI models such as GPT-4 and SWE-Llama-13b, Devin outperformed in resolution-oriented coding tasks.

Devin also can seek out additional online learning material as it arrives to assist with current and future developing issues due to autonomous nature, which has the potential to save developers even more time than GitHub’s current suggestive AI platform.

Devin’s appearance has buttressed the belief that artificial general intelligence can be optimized and aimed specifically at commercial audiences, a business strategy that Microsoft has been quick to champion since its pivot away from Bing Chat to Copilot and Copilot Pro.

However, Microsoft will need to craft a plan to work alongside or outperform Devin and Cognition’s potential trajectory with commercialized engineering software that could cause a fundamental industry shift sooner than the company had envisioned.