Recently, Devin the supposed "First AI Software Engineer" was announced. The company lied and said that their video showed Devin completing and getting paid for freelance jobs on Upwork, but it didn't show that at all.

UPDATE!!: The original job poster of the Upwork task has made his own video!! Go watch it here:    • Devin didn't solve my computer vision...  
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I'm not kidding! Go watch the original poster's video!

I broke down the Devin Upwork video frame by frame, and here I show what Devin was supposed to do, what it actually managed to do instead, and how bad a job of that it did.

On the whole that's not surprising given the current state of Generative AI, and I wouldn't be bothering to debunk it, except:
1) The company lied about what Devin could do in the video description, and
2) a lot of people uncritically parroted the lie all over the Internet, and
3) That caused a lot of nontechnical people to believe that AI might replace programmers soon.

00:00 Intro
00:30 The claim and the problem
03:47 What the job actually would have required
05:50 Requirements that needed to be determined
07:32 How a human compensates for Upwork's lack of RFP process
10:11 What Devin did instead, and how poorly
13:03 Devin seems to be fixing code from Github
14:19 But Devin is actually making up errors, and then fixing them
15:40 All Devin had to do was run the command from the README
16:23 But Devin couldn't figure that out
16:26 So it created this nightmare 'C'style lowlevel buffer append loop in Python
17:25 My replication of what Devin tried to do
18:15 It took me about 36 minutes
20:16 It took Devin at least six hours, and maybe more than a day
20:48 more bad Devin code
22:08 List of useless things that make Devin look competent
23:48 Conclusion, and a Plea

Video falsely claiming "Watch Devin make money taking on messy Upwork tasks!" that I'm debunking:
   • Devin's Upwork Side Hustle  

Raw, uncut, boring video of me replicating Devin's results in 1/12th the time:    • Debunking Devin Supplemental: Screen ...  

My video about communication being the most important part of software work:
   • Software Engineer jobs (MidSenior) c...  

My video about why Devin isn't really a "Software Engineer":
   • No, Devin is not a Software Engineer....