A MongoDB setup error revealed Devin’s potential

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 33:29

   spin up mongo db i want to understand why you picked that yeah so mongo db it wasn't on purpose or anything by the way we were literally we were playing around with i guess there wasn't a term for a coding agent back then but like the idea of like what it would look like to have like a coding agent this is like end of 2023 so like there's not you know there were not any of these that existed um uh but you know we made these little things it's kind of funny you know one of my co-founders steven and another co-founders walden um we were all like okay we're gonna make the dev version of our cell like that the the ai debt right so there's like a dev steven you know in our slack and then there's like a dev walden in our site and then eventually obviously we took all those ideas and like made it into a single um you know single product and that was dev naturally as

2. 34:16

   the kind of culmination of all these. But yeah, we had each of these, and people were building them, and just messing around and trying to get them to do cool things, right? Like, what can you do if you can actually, like, test your code and not just, like, LLM completion your code, you know? What can you do if you, like, hook it up so that it can actually run commands in the terminal or, like, you know, have, like, a basic, super basic, like, browser use thing, right?

3. 34:42

   And we were messing around with these. and then we actually just needed mongodb ourselves so like walden was walden this is actually what happened so walden was setting up mongodb and then um you know it's like sometimes with these when you're trying to set up a developer tool it's kind of like this or like a database or any of these things where it's like um you just like run a bunch of commands you like paste it in the things that it told you to go and do and then it's just like not working and there's some error this board or whatever and maybe it's because one random dependency package is on the wrong version and that messes up everything, maybe it's because you have some other process that's open on your computer that's hogging it or whatever, but for whatever reason, like MongoDB, like

4. 35:25

   Walden was just like not getting it set up and you do it, you always do it you just google the error message and you see what that says and you try that command or whatever this person on Stack Overflow said it didn't work you know back in the days before ai you had to go do that um and uh and he like spent some time on it and he's just like yeah i don't know so then he had his devin at the time basically he's like all right devin just go just go just go try and make it work and it turned out to be like a really great use case because if you kind of think about what do you need you need number one you just need like encyclopedic knowledge of all the different errors that you can run into and what would I'm going to go.

5. 36:00

   And then number two, you need the ability to actually run and diagnose things. It's one thing to just have the error message and nothing else, but it's another thing to be able to go run commands, to go look at the other running processes, to go and whatever else you need to go do. And obviously, those two things, like the encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to actually go and run commands, I mean, that's literally what a coding agent is.

6. 36:23

   um and like devin just ran a bunch of stuff for a few minutes and then fixed it and then and then like sent walden a message like hey i got it it's up now walden really he didn't really believe it at first i think we still have the video recording of that really so unbelievable and that was like i remember like i couldn't sleep that night like we were just like shit like maybe it maybe it does work you know maybe you can just have like an ai engineer buddy that can just do work for you you know but that was like the very first moment that we believed it was possible i would say