The beginning of the end of handcrafted programming, maybe

Sam Lin
2 min readMar 17, 2024
Gen AI & The Future of SW Development Bootcamp via Google Meet/Chrome in a Polestar 2

AI SoftWear Engineers (SWE) are almost here, go Devin. I understand most arguments of it’s too early to worry about that to replace SWE jobs anytime soon. But, achieving 13+% of a “Real World SWE performance” as Cognition claimed is very impressive. I bet with the power of Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback(RLHF) & crazy progresses week by week, a Software as Service(SaaS) players like Cognition could be on the fast line to iterate toward a mass commercial adoption.

*Devin was evaluated on a random 25% subset of the dataset. Devin was unassisted, whereas all other models were assisted (meaning the model was told exactly which files need to be edited).

To adapt or not to adapt

Being a Techno-Optimist, I believe if AI SWE will replace human SWE is a wrong question. I’m more exciting about how the tech can augment more. For example, how it may level the playing field for more to solve the problems they care by machines. This year, a few of us are doing an experiment to teach 15+ high school students in Taiwan to get started with GenAI app development with all the AI helps they can get. It is also inspired by CS50.dev & the virtual duck from Harvard University’s CS50. We are eager to learn how far they can go in 8 weeks. Just like the saying: “If you can not beat them, join them” 🦾.

Introducing CS50.ai in CS50x 2024 — Artificial Intelligence

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Sam Lin

A Taiwanese lives in Silicon Valley since 2014 with my own random opinions to share. And, they are my own, not those of companies I work for.