Cognition | Introducing Devin, the first AI software engineer

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cognition-labs.com·cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin

A landmark capabilities announcement relevant to AI safety researchers studying autonomous agents, as Devin exemplifies long-horizon goal pursuit and reduced human-in-the-loop requirements — raising questions about oversight and control of agentic AI systems.

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Importance: 62/100press releasenews

Summary

Cognition Labs introduces Devin, an autonomous AI agent capable of end-to-end software engineering tasks including writing, debugging, and deploying code. Devin represents a significant capabilities milestone demonstrating long-horizon task completion with persistent memory and tool use. The announcement highlights performance on SWE-bench and showcases Devin completing real engineering jobs autonomously.

Key Points

•Devin is presented as the first fully autonomous AI software engineer, capable of planning and executing complex multi-step coding tasks.
•Achieves state-of-the-art results on SWE-bench, resolving 13.86% of real-world GitHub issues end-to-end without human assistance.
•Uses a persistent shell, code editor, and browser in a sandboxed environment, demonstrating long-horizon agentic task execution.
•Demonstrates ability to learn new technologies, build and deploy applications, and find/fix bugs in large codebases autonomously.
•Represents a capabilities jump relevant to AI safety discussions around autonomous agents, goal persistence, and human oversight.

Cited by 1 page

Page	Type	Quality
Long-Horizon Autonomous Tasks	Capability	65.0

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[Blog](https://cognition.ai/blog/1)/ [Announcements](https://cognition.ai/blog/Announcements/1)

March 12, 2024

# Introducing Devin, the first AI software engineer

by Scott Wu

In this article:

Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review.

With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals.

## Devin's Capabilities

With our advances in long-term reasoning and planning, Devin can plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. Devin can recall relevant context at every step, learn over time, and fix mistakes.

We've also equipped Devin with common developer tools including the shell, code editor, and browser within a sandboxed compute environment—everything a human would need to do their work.

Finally, we've given Devin the ability to actively collaborate with the user. Devin reports on its progress in real time, accepts feedback, and works together with you through design choices as needed.‍Here's a sample of what Devin can do:

### Devin can learn how to use unfamiliar technologies.

AI Software Engineer Plants Secret Messages in Images - YouTube

[Photo image of Cognition](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk_Il3HoK3qTz1tvzyphozg?embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fcognition.ai%2F)

Cognition

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[AI Software Engineer Plants Secret Messages in Images](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwnkdngr7fU)

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After reading a blog post, Devin runs ControlNet on Modal to produce images with concealed messages for Sara.

### Devin can build and deploy apps end to end

Devin making Game of Life! - YouTube

[Photo image of Cognition](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk_Il3HoK3qTz1tvzyphozg?embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fcognition.ai%2F)

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[Devin making Game of Life!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G45NKnAWuXc)

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Devin makes an interactive website which simulates the Game of Life! It incrementally adds features reque

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Resource ID: a4efa407affdbe1c | Stable ID: NGQxOTQxYz