The First Ever AI Software Developer? And MidJourney Releases Consistent Characters.

Short and sweet for today's newsletter. Enjoy!

Mar 13, 2024

Morning y’all!

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Today there are a two interesting apps, one new and one old-ish, that have recently been announced with some very interesting features.

The first is Devin, an app by Cognition, that some are heralding as the first-ever “AI software engineer” and has the capacity of fully building software projects, all the the way from coding to execution.

Apparently it’s doing this while offering superior performance compared to other models like Claude 2, SWE-Llama-13b, and GPT-4 in the SWE-bench test by resolving 13.86% of issues.

Dang. Take a look:

Of course, it’s meant to work alongside humans to automate processes, not people (at least not entirely). Naturally, people are having a ton of hot takes on what this means for developers and the industry at large. I think this reasonable thought squares with my thinking:

If you could fully automate software engineering (my job), I think that would be great, since I could then move on to higher-leverage things. Making software is a means to an end, not the end (software is different from art in that sense).
However I have not yet seen any signs that we're going to be able to automate more than an infinitesimal fraction of my job -- not even "this might work someday maybe if $100B gets invested in the area and if we're very lucky" type of signs. I wish!

The thing is that we don’t have to be scared of the coming changes but instead excited! Automation has been a big part of how we’ve evolved as humans but strangely we seem to forget these personal experiences whenever we encounter something that we don’t quite understand.

For instance, I’m old enough to remember what it’s like carrying a ton of physical maps in my car when I started driving! They would be tucked underneath my seat and whenever I needed help I’d have to pull over to the side and take them out. I’m so glad directions have been automated into a device that sits in my pocket!

The possibilities are exciting:

A few more examples can be found on their blog.

The second app is Midjourney, a long-standing competitor in the generative art space that has done a great job of creating unique artwork (and the results are almost always very, very good).

But the most common ask is for consistent characters and MJ is not going to disappoint! A new algorithm can execute designs using the same person / character without significant deviation from the original!

This is the one thing that really separates itself against many of the existing generative tools and the examples I’ve seen are blowing my mind. MJ is quickly becoming a go-to tool and I hope that Stable Diffusion, my favorite tool, gets some of this yummy goodness soon.

Eventually most tools worthy of your time will create consistent artifacts, not just art but video, code, marketing copy, and more. Generating unique art is cool but doing it repetitively with the same collateral is totally next-level.

Do you use MJ? Let me know what you think! And that’s it, short and sweet. Have a wonderful day folks!

※\(^o^)/※

— Summer