Their ads in SF are pretty funny. “Remember Devin? It’s good now”. Okay, very self-aware, Cognition.

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.

a reminder that money does enable you to make mistakes and buys you the ability to correct from them

Yes. If they are really open, you can use them as you wish. Some licenses are less open though.