Comment by fishtoaster
18 hours ago
A friend recently pushed me to try out their coding platform, Devin, after I decided to move away from Cursor. I had the same reaction: "What, the con artists from like 2024?" But after some cajoling, I gave it a shot and was pleasantly surprised. I guess they learned their lessons, grew up, and are doing good work now, maybe?
Their ads in SF are pretty funny. “Remember Devin? It’s good now”. Okay, very self-aware, Cognition.
Devin CLI is easily the worst-in-class coding harness I've ever been subjected to using, rife with bugs (up to and including dropping answers to the question tool), so I can't say I'm exactly inspired to try anything else the company produces.
Can't say I've tried the CLI. I've mostly focused on the cloud agents, which I was explicitly looking for. I compared against cursor's cloud agents, ampcode, and hoplite, and came out surprisingly enjoying devin.
I will say that the lack of parity between Devin cloud and Devin desktop is downright embarrassing. It's very clear that the latter is a thinly-reskinned Windsurf. A visually similar UI with vastly different capabilities. Definitely a black mark on the whole thing.
Had the same experience on it when it was going by Windsurf. Had to wire up a skill hooked to terminal runs or else it would hang or freeze and never finish literally every single time
I see issues with other harnesses too but not with the regularity I was getting from this. And the one moat they had with the better UI for per-project multi-agent orch disappeared and now is standardized
Not all that surprising. The original Devin really was just an early attempt at agentic coding before models were really even trained for it. Now that it's a well established pattern and we've figured out what works, I'm not surprised they've morphed into something reasonble.
When they launched Devin it was supposedly at the performance of an engineering intern. Friends who used it found the bad parts of an intern (tons of handholding, review required) but it didn’t learn from mistakes or add throughput.
They seem to love a good overpromise.
I think the evolution of the harness and ability to preserve loop context outside the context window has made running these kinds of agentic experiences easier.
sorry so many buzzwords to say, the capabilities to do this kind of work are more accessible and easier to manage, so now it works!
Good to see, and agree they were severely overhyping their product back then.
Devin lacks many features and doesn't even have an exec mode. Other than they subsidize the subscription, the added value here is low.
I used Windsurf for quite long and they're basically dead for now after they became Devin.
Everything feels dull and they're always several features behind while Cursor is just killing it every other week.
I'm back to VsCode plus Copilot Pro.
Same, but I'm back to just Claude Code and the occasional vscode, though for my latest project I switched to Astra instead
a reminder that money does enable you to make mistakes and buys you the ability to correct from them
> and buys you the ability to correct from them
Or at the very least, make more mistakes.