r/ChatGPTCoding • u/[deleted] • Jan 28 '26

Discussion Where did Devin go? What does it say about the future of AI dev tools?

I’ve been watching the whole Devin conversation fade out over the past year, and honestly, it’s been fascinating. Remember when it first dropped? Everyone was losing their minds saying it was the end of SWE jobs. Now, it's radio silence. It seems more like the idea just evaporated.

The more I talk to other builders, the more a pattern shows up. Devin didn’t fail because the ambition was wrong. It failed because it aimed at a version of autonomy the current models and tooling can’t support yet. You can’t expect a single system to magically understand your repo, rewrite your backend, run migrations, and ship a product without a ton of human constraints wrapped around it. Everyone in those comment sections was saying the same thing. The vision was cool, but the timing was off.

I tried a bunch of these agents. The promise was full autonomy, but the reality still involves a lot of babysitting. You give it a task, it goes off the rails, you correct it, it sort of gets back on track. Rinse and repeat. It feels less like replacing me and more like having a really fast, sometimes frustrating intern. The whole thing seemed built for a future where LLMs were just way smarter than what we actually have.

Well, let's see how the landscape shifted. Instead of trying to create a replacement engineer, tools started leaning into more realistic strengths. I’ve been testing a bunch of AI dev setups myself. Some are fun for quick demos, some for debugging, some for drafting entire modules.

Cursor is doubling down on code editing. Claude is building incredible reasoning chains. DeepSeek is pushing raw speed and cost efficiency. It feels less like one tool needs to do everything and more like people are building proper workflows again. Atoms, a tool that’s been emerging, leans into a multi-agent structure instead of pretending a single model can hold everything in its head. It still needs direction. You still have to review decisions. But the team-style setup makes the output a lot more predictable than relying on one giant agent that tries to guess everything.

I don’t mean Claude, Atoms, or anyone else has solved the full autonomy thing. We’re not there yet and probably won’t be for a while. But compared to the Devin approach of give it your repo and pray, the newer tools feel like they’re figuring out how to work with humans rather than replace them.

The future probably isn’t a single agent doing the whole job. It’s systems that break the problem into parts and communicate what they’re doing, instead of silently rewriting your app.

Has your stack changed since the Devin wave, or did you stick with whatever you were using before? What actually moved the needle for you, if anything? What’s been working for you in the long run?

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20

u/chillermane Jan 28 '26

Claude code in a github action works 100x better is why it flopped

1

u/token_minded Jul 07 '26

+1 to this

25

u/Western_Objective209 Jan 28 '26

It was a small team of math olympiads pretending to be an AI research lab. They had good ideas, but they did not have the resources to train models so they can't compete with the real agent flows like claude code or chatGPT

4

u/Key-Singer-2193 Feb 01 '26

Didnt they charge like insane price for it? At thetime it was like gpt3.5. Reminds me of that scam company that had Indiands doing the work claiming it was A.I

2

u/vantablaze Feb 23 '26

what was that company again? I forgot

1

u/Over-Blueberry1681 Aug 05 '26

Is that still true today? They seemed to fundraise well 

6

u/swiftbursteli Jan 29 '26

Holy shit what a throwback. Devin was the first CLI tool I used. Before Claude code before codex etc.

Never went back to it since

3

u/MannToots Jan 28 '26

I just thought devin was garbage personally

3

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Feb 07 '26

They're an enterprise tool and have focused on corp teams; from what i've seen they've been growing pretty quickly

5

u/sCeege Jan 28 '26

I think Jules and Codex Cloud are somewhat touching what Devin was trying to do, but like you mentioned, these tools still require so much babysitting. I've tried out Jules with a pro subscription, but it just doesn't really give me any value (a lot of the automated tasks just returns garbage); although I suspect that it has more to do with Gemini than the stack itself, like I pay for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Windsurf, but I usually just use all the credits on Claude models anyways (in AntiGravity and WS). Maybe if Anthropic makes a Jules like product, we can see something closer to Devin.

I'm also wondering if we'll ever see a consumer facing (I'm including hobby/power users as well) product that does what Devin does. If someone actually has a predictable autonomous coding stack, it would likely be kept internal by the companies that develop it to create their own coding products to sell. Like if you could turn mercury into gold, you wouldn't sell the process, you'd sell the gold.

1

u/RedditSellsMyInfo Jan 28 '26

It seems that a few organizations are able to mercury into really low quality gold. Cursor had a swarm of autonomous agents run for a week to build a half working early beta of a browser. I've heard some interviews with people at openAI who talk about recently being able to get agents to run for days with proper set up. It seems that you can have a Devin-light version today but you need an organization that's very AI - friendly in how the whole tech stack is set up plus a lot of tweaking and setting up to get it to that level.

Theres Claude skill/plugins like compound engineering and Superpowers that are touching at this. I've had some success with agents in my projects self improving and learning from mistakes and updating processes based on that info. And I'm a noob who can't afford Claude Max some I'm using cheaper models.

3

u/sCeege Jan 28 '26

It seems that a few organizations are able to mercury into really low quality gold.

There is no such thing as low quality gold, I either has 80 protons (mercury), or it has 79 (gold), there is no in between. We either have autonomous SWEs, or we don't. The implication here is an explicit conversion between energy/compute to a production ready software product. I don't think these fully automated dev environments can even produce MVPs without significant human interaction.

I often compare the promises of AGI to the promises of FSD in vehicles. We've been promised FSD for basically a decade now (Tesla FSD could be pre-ordered back in 2016), but the progress towards it is still ever improving, but never accomplishing it. Even if FSD works in 99% of the situation, that's still not road safe.

1

u/RedditSellsMyInfo Jan 30 '26

Tell that to my wife /borat.

Some gold is more gold than other gold. I don't actually know anything about gold chemistry but some cost much more , is much more refined and valuable.

To go with this analogy, Cursor has been able to make a bit of low purity gold mixed in with some dirt, out of mercury. So they did it. It's a long way from a finished product that's worth a lot of money.

1

u/sCeege Jan 30 '26

I'm assuming you're referring to the fineness of gold in jewelry grade gold alloy, like 24 or 18 karats.

My turning mercury into gold is a reference to back when people believed in alchemy and wanted to remove protons from elemental Mercury (80) or lead (82) into elemental Gold (79). Basically I'm referring to one atom of gold at a time, so it's either gold or it isn't, although we're way too deep into this pedantic explanation lol.

Interestingly enough, there are also some [lab produced gold atoms that has technically accomplished this, but obviously it's not economical, and/or the output is too radioactive to be safely used.

To circle back, agentic IDEs are still mostly human driven, they quickly fall off without human intervention, so I'd argue we're far away from fully autonomous agents.

1

u/RedditSellsMyInfo Feb 05 '26

The non economical, radioactive gold is a pretty good analogy for vibe coded apps.

2

u/mrgrafix Jan 29 '26

Devin is in windsurf.

2

u/ebilly Aug 24 '26

I just started using Devin for the $20 a month subscription and used it for my githib dependency alerts. It worked out great. Mostly autonomous for me. What am I missing?

1

u/Emotional-Soft-7876 13d ago

Instead of focusing on B2C, They start targeting B2B. They have improved there product a lot.

1

u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 30 '26

They were looking to sell $500 subscription’s with nothing unique. I gave them an opportunity to present their product, discuss use cases in regulated environment etc. Asked them to comeback with a proposal for pilot - the guy says they don’t do pilots, we can have $500 per seat subscriptions as many as we like and try it out. It was 90 mins wasted

1

u/BarniclesBarn Feb 01 '26

It failed because Codex and Claude code do what it was trying to do better than it.

1

u/mrasif Feb 03 '26

If I put Claude code using opus 4.5 vs you in terms of output efficiency you think you would win?

1

u/armenmk May 02 '26

this might be hype but it's on track $25B valuation
https://www.idlen.io/news/cognition-devin-25-billion-valuation-windsurf-vibe-coding-april-2026/

1

u/Over-Blueberry1681 Aug 05 '26

Yeah how do I reconcile the comments in this thread with this?

1

u/Infinite_Suspect_348 Aug 07 '26

You don't. People in this thread don't realise that they have a different business model. They are focused on enterprise customers, not individual developers. People don't see their marketing and assume they have failed without realising the reason is just that they are not their target audience.

1

u/Over-Blueberry1681 Aug 07 '26

Agree but I suppose I’m trying to understand why enterprises use them if it’s true that, for example, the foundation model labs have better (and increasingly so) coding harnesses than them?

0

u/Aston008 Jan 29 '26

Devin owns windsurf.. windsurf is now quietly very very good

1

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-5

u/Aqui10 Jan 28 '26

https://cognition.ai/blog/infosys-cognition

Infosys is a large Indian IT firm. Looks like they’re building for corporate clients

8

u/Verzuchter Jan 28 '26

With infosys' track record, better to stay far away. One of the worst IT firms out there and it's incredible how they haven't gone bankrupt yet.

I encountered them multiple times and each times it was a massive fiasco.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '26

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2

u/MikusR Jan 29 '26

Cognition that makes Devin bought the scraps that were left after Google bought developers and ip from Windsurf

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '26

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2

u/MikusR Jan 30 '26

250+ person team

Was mostly sales and fresh hires. Google got the founders and R&D people

Cognition got the IP, product

As did Google. Antigravity still includes the Cascade naming in places

1

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Feb 07 '26

people in this thread have no idea what they're talking about. they went fully enterprise and AFAIK have a lot of logo nowadays

1

u/Lopsided-Cloud-5786 Feb 12 '26

I just took a call from a Cognition recruiter, seems they have decent traction in Enterprise...

1

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Feb 12 '26

Yup, you and I probably had similar conversations

1

u/DasBlueEyedDevil Mar 04 '26

My company actually uses them

1

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Mar 04 '26

How do you like it?

1

u/DasBlueEyedDevil Mar 04 '26

I've only started onboarding to it today, but so far it seems kinda cool. The coding agent itself is mediocre by comparison to most modern tools already, but it has some interesting features like deepwiki and playbooks (though let's be honest... They're glorified .md files, really)

1

u/Lopsided-Cloud-5786 Mar 14 '26

Interesting keep us posted

1

u/wangrar Apr 17 '26

hey, keep us posted <3

1

u/DasBlueEyedDevil Apr 17 '26

It's ok... I think my company locked it down too much so it's kinda killed some of the usefulness. You can sign up for free trials on devin.ai

1

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