Devin and Me: One Month with an AI Software Engineering Agent

I've been using Devin from Cognition for one month now, but it easily feels like a whole quarter of development work. That's the funny thing about habits: they can compress or expand time depending on how much they change your workflow.

That's how it feels having left traditional engineering practices after years inside the closed garden of manual coding. It was initially challenging to trust an AI with my codebase, but since then, I've found a balanced approach where Devin handles the predictable tasks while I focus on architecture.

Humans naturally resist change until the benefits become undeniable. I've seen this play out in my own skepticism that gradually transformed into practical appreciation.

The older you get in the tech industry, the more you've seen innovations come and go, making adaptation sometimes feel exhausting. But working with Devin has rekindled a curiosity about what's possible when you automate the predictable parts of engineering.

I believe in Devin's capabilities for certain tasks while recognizing it's not a silver bullet. There are legitimate reasons why complex, cross-component work still requires human engineers with holistic understanding and creative problem-solving abilities.

You can't force colleagues to adopt new tools by evangelizing too aggressively. I've found showing rather than telling creates more genuine interest.

Sharing specific success stories about how Devin fixed frontend bugs in minutes that would have taken me an hour seems to naturally draw interest. It's like planting seeds that others can water with their own curiosity.

I'll continue using Devin for narrowly-scoped tasks regardless of whether it becomes widely adopted. It reminds me of when I switched to automated testing years ago – the immediate feedback loop is addictive once you experience it.

So consider this a postcard from one month into the AI-assisted development journey. I'm standing at the intersection of human creativity and AI efficiency, waving to both sides. I'm happier than I've been in years about the future of software engineering.