Devin, the first AI software engineer

[t3chg33k]

If "Devin" randomly decides to push ransomware to the production server 0.01% of the time -- or just fail in one out of a billion different ways that would be catastrophic for the people that employ him, then "he" will need constant babysitting and end up as little more than a useful tool for a human engineer to supervise. Imagine how vulnerable your company becomes when you employ the same army of AI devs as every other corp, and someone finds a exploit to get him to babble API keys or cause him to produce insecure code that can then be exploited by a human. Imagine how large the potential attack surface is for a technology that we don't quite understand yet. Imagine how many corporate MBAs will push this hard only to have it backfire gloriously in their faces.

P(Devin replacing a good software engineer who writes anything more interesting than boilerplate) = P(Bangalore uber drivers getting replaced by Elongated Muskrat's self-driving cars that will come out in 2020...no wait, 2022, no sorry, uhh, 2027?) Not saying it won't happen but reports of the demise of people's jobs are greatly exaggerated and premature.

A lot of the IT shopping that clients do is to generate code at volume and for cheap, which anyway has to be peer reviewed by a senior developer before production deployment. It is easy to imagine this will replace all the entry-level coders as any experienced developer will get much more performant code in a short time, without having to waste time on explaining the errors.

 

[TEUser2K1]

Instacart’s AI-powered smart carts, which offer real-time recommendations and 'gamified' shopping, are coming to more U.S. grocery stores

Grocers plan to increase spending on AI by 400% by 2025.

fortune.com

"While the company initially touted Just Walk Out’s AI capabilities, which leveraged cameras to track items shoppers placed in their baskets, there were several reports the technology actually relied on 1,000 workers in India monitoring the camera feeds. The e-commerce giant denied the reports, but said employees in India do spot-check the camera data."