Scott Wu: belief

Transcript context

…Understatement of the century. Let me ask this question because you touched on it a bit, this whole idea of Devin as a person and this idea of creating a personality for Devin. It's unlike any other, I believe, AI app. No one else has a name and you don't think of it as a person. What made you guys decide to go that approach and just how do you design it to work well that way? I would say it's a decision we're pretty proud of, I would say. I mean, I think there's a lot of different product experiences out there, and I think the thing that really makes Devin unique in what it does is that you can really hand off and more and more what we've seen honestly is that I think a lot of kind of explaining the Devin experience to folks is really just explain it as, yeah, this is your junior buddy. And that goes for a lot of the parts of the flow where in the onboarding for example, initially I would say we've definitely had a lot of users come in and just kind of see the blank screen and not really know, or they'd ask, "Hey, I'm going to do this whole big re-architecture, the whole code base." And basically what we've learned over time is to basically get folks to think more like whoa, whoa, whoa, let's work on getting the repository set up first. Let's make sure we hand Devin a couple one pointer tasks so it can get familiar with the code base. Let's get it the thing. If Devin needs to be able to test the code or run the linter or CI or things like that. Obviously we want to make sure Devin's got its own virtual machine set up to be able to do that. And similarly, I think the usage pattern, I think often it wasn't clear and obviously you can sit and just kind of watch Devin do it action by action and work that way, but we found that the best workflow really as a team building a lot of stuff was to work with multiple Devins and to run them asynchronously and to kick them off and to only jump in basically as you needed to provide feedback or steer the plan or anything like that. And so in many ways, I think Devin as a name really is our attempt to kind of capture the soul of that as a product where it really is treating it like a bit more of an autonomous entity that you can hand off tasks, that you can work with, that you should be teaching and learning with over time. I want to come back to an area you started us down and then I took us away from which is impact on software engineering and how software engineering is going to change. So there's kind of two parts to this. Just like when people are using Devin today, say this year, how is the act of being an engineer and building changing for those companies? What does that look like?…

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