Devin AI is an autonomous

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

assistant tool created by Cognition Labs. Branded as an "AI

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

", the demo tool is designed to complete

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

tasks. The tool has received praise, concern, and skepticism over implications surrounding the future of artificial intelligence and software development.

Background

Devin AI was created by Cognition Labs, a startup company consisting of ten members including CEO Scott Wu and chief technology officer Steven Hao, with funding from

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. According ...

Founders Fund Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund formed in 2005 and based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $17 billion in total assets under management as of 2025. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration T ...

firm. Several of the members had participated in competitive coding contests before forming the company. The members developed the software via a combination of training

large language models A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

akin to

OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

GPT-4 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model trained and created by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the p ...

with aspects from

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an interdisciplinary area of machine learning and optimal control concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learnin ...

. According to a ''

Bloomberg Bloomberg may refer to: People * Daniel J. Bloomberg (1905–1984), audio engineer * Georgina Bloomberg (born 1983), professional equestrian * Michael Bloomberg (born 1942), American businessman and founder of Bloomberg L.P.; politician a ...

'' article, Cognition Labs claimed that Devin AI represents a "breakthrough in a computer's ability to reason." Devin AI has also been considered part of a trend surrounding the advent of autonomous AI agents that can take direct action to solve problems.

Abilities

Devin AI has been noted for its ability to perform software engineering tasks autonomously. Compared to the

GitHub Copilot GitHub Copilot is a code completion and automatic programming tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI that assists users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocomplete, autocom ...

tool, the software can code, debug, plan and problem solve via machine learning techniques. Devin AI works through a user prompting the software with a task in

natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

, with the software responding by showing its plan while implementing the code. It searches online resources during the process to learn to complete a task. The software also takes prompts from users during the implementation process and adjusts its plans accordingly, such as when a user notices an issue or bug. One application of Devin AI is website creation. A test conducted by ''Bloomberg'' revealed that the tool could create a website within ten minutes and could recreate a ''

Pong ''Pong'' is a 1972 sports video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. It is one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but B ...

'' website in a similar timeframe. In a demo from Cognition Labs, the tool also created a website based on the Llama 2 language model through plan, source code and benchmark testing generation. Other examples include building a project to display images from a blog post, and compiling a

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

model from an

Upwork Upwork Inc., formerly Elance-oDesk, is an American freelancing platform headquartered in Santa Clara and San Francisco, California. The company was formed in 2013 as Elance-oDesk after the merger of Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp. The merged compa ...

project. In a benchmark test for analyzing the performance of large language models on real world projects, Devin was found to fix 13.86 percent of encountered issues with no human assistance, compared to an average of 1.96 percent and 4.8 percent for an unassisted and assisted model, respectively. Later revisions of Devin got multi-agent operation capability, where one of the AI agents dispatch task to other AI agents. Even later versions got self-assessed confidence evaluation, asking for clarification when it is not confident enough to perform the task as assigned.

Search and documentation tool

In early 2025, Devin got a machine generated software documentation feature called Devin Wiki, along with an interactive search&answer engine to query on the code, called Devin Search. A later release opened up these two features to non-subscribers, and this non-subscription version is called DeepWiki.

Reception

Devin AI has been met with praise, concern and skepticism from journalists and software engineers. Its announcement on X led to praise from investors and software engineers while spawning various memes. Along with the company, the tool has seen optimism amongst AI enthusiasts and anticipation for its public availability. The tool has also been noted for potentially allowing users of a non-technical background to create projects, and aiding developers in solving more complex tasks. ''

The Indian Express ''The Indian Express'' is an English-language Indian daily newspaper founded in 1932 by P. Varadarajulu Naidu. It is headquartered in Noida, owned by the ''Indian Express Group''. It was later taken over by Ramnath Goenka. In 1999, eight y ...

'' claimed that its capabilities could streamline the software development process while avoiding human error. CEO Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity.ai offered praise to Devin, claiming that it "seemed to be 'the first demo of any agent, leave alone coding, that seems to cross the threshold' of human capability." After the release of Devin AI, Cognition Labs experienced increasing growth and interest. Earlier this year, the startup raised $21 million in a deal valuing it at $350 million. It then turned down offers valuing it at $1 billion. According to the ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

'', the company has been in talks with investors for a deal that would value it at up to $2 billion. Concern for the software includes its implications for the future of AI and the software development industry. In the wake of layoffs within the tech industry throughout 2023 and 2024, discourse of the tool involves concerns that it may replace engineers and remove lower-level jobs. On social media, various developers expressed criticism for the software's capabilities and potential to incite job layoffs. Skepticism also emerged that the tool may struggle to complete tasks with more intricate requirements and scenarios that would necessitate human creativity, along with its efficiency. Further skepticism regarding its accuracy has emerged following the tool's promotional videos, such as its performance of Devin AI's execution of the Upwork project; YouTube channels such as ''Internet of Bugs'' and ''Computer Vision Project'' criticized the tool for failing to deliver on the project request, instead writing, testing, and debugging code irrelevant to the Upwork request. However, the tool has also been regarded to encourage software engineers to perform more creative work. Following Devin's debut, various AI software engineering models have been released, such as

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

replacements like OpenDevin (now called OpenHands) and Devika, and Genie by San Francisco-based startup Cosine.

References

External links