Comment by noodletheworld

1 day ago

Those “how I feel about Devin after using it” comments at the bottom are damning, when you compare them to the user testimonials of people using cursor.

Seems to me that agents just aren’t the answer people want them to be, just a hype wave obscuring real progress in other areas (eg. MCST) because they’re easy to implement.

…but really, if things are easy to implement, at this point, you have to ask why they haven’t been done yet.

Probably, it seems, because it’s harder to implement in a way that’s useful than it superficially appears…

Ie. If the smart folk working on Devin can only do something of this level, anyone working on agentic systems should be worried, because it’s unlikely you can do better, without better underlying models.

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noodletheworld

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freddref  1 day ago

How is Devin different from cursor?

I recently used cursor and it has felt very capable in implementing tasks across files. I get that cursor is an IDE but it's ai functionality feels very agentic.. where do you draw the line?

  • jondwillis  10 hours ago

    Cursor Composer (both "normal" and "agent" mode) fit the colloquial definition of agent, for sure.

  • Xmd5a  1 day ago

    I had to look up MCST: it means Model-Centric Software Tools, as opposed to autonomous agents.

    Devin is closer to a long-running process that you can interact with as it is processing tasks, whereas Cursor is closer to a function call: once you've made the call, the only think you can do is wait for the result.

Melomomololo  1 day ago

Agents are really new and would solve plenty of annoying things.

When I code with Claude, I have to copy paste files around.

But everything we do in AI is new and outdated a few weeks ago.

Claude is really good but blocks you in 1-3h for a bit due to context length.

That type of issues will be solved.

And local coding models are super fast on a 4090 already. Imagine a small project digits on your desktop were you allow these models also more thinking. But the thinking style models again are super new.

Things probably are not done yet because we humans are the bottleneck right now. Getting enough chips, energy, standards, training time, doing experiments with tech a while tech b starts to emerge from another corner of ai.

5090 just was announced and depending on benchmarks it might be 1.x-3 times faster. if it's faster above 1.5 that would again be huge.