An AI Agent Now Costs More Than a Junior Developer In India

The ‘I’ in India stands for IT services. Last year, over 2,50,000 youths were hired in the Indian IT sector fresh out of college. This year, over 1 lakh freshers received offer letters. While there is a decline in the number of jobs, the curve is set to grow in the coming months. 

Let’s look into the moolah. On average, a fresher is paid $4,000 per year (approximately ₹3.5 lakh annually). 

Enter Devin, an end-to-end AI-enabled software development tool built by Cognition Labs that aims to replace junior programmers or developers in organisations. What does it cost a company? It is priced at $500 a month, which amounts to $6,000 annually. 

A Junior Dev(in) Everyone’s Desk

While the $500 monthly price tag might seem steep, Cognition Labs puts no limit on the number of seats when using the tool within a team. While positioned as an all-purpose tool, Devin recommends using the tool for front-end bugs, creating first-draft pull requests (PRs) for backlogs, and making targeted code refractors. 

Apart from the primary chat interface, Devin is also available as a Slack integration, wherein it begins to work on an issue when users tag it in a thread. Users can also start a Devin session directly from VS Code. 

Internally, Devin is said to be impactful in Cognition Labs’ tech stack. It became the number one contributor in many of its internal tools and front-end repositories last month. The company also showed off how Devin monitored the stats from Devin’s launch, and they asked the tool to assemble the data in a .csv file and monitor it for twelve hours. 

Cognition Labs also revealed that Devin was able to solve, test, and fix an issue in Anthropic’s model context protocol (MCP). We’re witnessing a case where one AI agent is fixing another. 

It isn’t all about the owner’s pride; other organisations, too, were able to augment their workflows and project timelines. 

Sam Purtill, VP of engineering at Advantage Solutions, wrote in a post on X, “One of our engineers gave Devin a bug, took their son to a piano lesson, came home to a perfect fix. Total time spent: minutes.”

Moreover, Devin may also help relieve employees from time-intensive and repetitive tasks. Karim Atiyeh, founder and CTO at Ramp, said Devin was “instrumental” in helping them clean up dead code and speed up their tests, thereby giving their engineers more time to focus on more important matters. 

Nubank, a neobank based out of Brazil, said that Devin was able to cut the timeline of a project short from 1.5 years to just two months. 

“Devin successfully delivered 12x efficiency improvement on engineering time, helping reduce the developer toil for Nubank engineers as they’ve scaled to over 110 million customers,” read a post by Cognition Labs on X. 

sure Devin can write code and manage PRs but is he a good culture hire? can he say “no updates” at standup? will he join the devops team for their quarterly bouldering outing?

— JT (@jiratickets) December 10, 2024

In another instance, Devin was also used at Dagger.io to solve the problem of less important issues that were unnoticed inside teams. 

“Three months later, nobody had time to even look. Until Devin arrives and opens a PR within minutes,” said Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Dagger. He added that anyone running an open-source project simply can’t afford not to take a shot at Devin. 

Devin Is STILL a Junior Engineer

There are two ways to look at Devin. It is as good as a junior developer, or it is only as good as a junior developer. 

As impressive as it seems, its capabilities are still limited. 

While Devin does the magic, there might not be a lot of opportunities to supervise or add your input during the process. Will Brown, an AI researcher at Morgan Stanley, said on X that it may get harder to help it out when it is stuck. 

In scenarios like these, using a tool like Cursor or Windsurf, where the user is still in the driving seat, is beneficial. 

“I think I slightly prefer the ‘pair programming’ workflow of Cursor agent, which is way more hands-on, but you’re reviewing the code in real-time, plus [you] can give suggestions more easily,” he said. 

Moreover, Devin still requires a few back-and-forths, which users may not want to do if they’re paying for an agent that claims to have autonomous capabilities. 

A user on X observed the chat sessions from the PRs and pointed out the same, saying, “3/5 Devin PRs look unimpressive, [and] can be done an order of magnitude faster [by] prompting yourself or just typing the code.” 

In a detailed review of Devin, Steve Sewell, CEO of Builder.io, said that he had to wait fifteen minutes for a PR and then have quite a few back-and-forths on Slack.

“I much prefer Cursor’s workflow, where I have all of this right in my local environment and IDE (integrated development environment),” he added. Moreover, users wouldn’t want Devin to go off on its own unless it provides a good sense of trust and confidence that it will be able to accomplish the task. 

So, the same concerns persist with hiring an intern, a junior developer, or Devin. All of these can ship a feature, but if the code base is devoid of industry-standard practices and ease of interpretation, it spells trouble. 

For instance, Devin was asked to make changes to a CSS code, but it added a few components that were unrelated and unnecessary. 

Not being able to understand such changes and a pile of AI-written code is a crucial problem. “AI always gives you an answer, and the answer is not just wrong, but also very hard to detect what is wrong about it. It just invents stuff,” said Mark Essien, CEO of Hotels.ng. 

Cory Zue, the founder of SaaS Pegasus, narrated a similar experience with a few interns who joined and shipped a feature but left a ‘mountain of code’ no one understood. 

“My own gut feel is that this is definitely happening, and many projects will die under the weight of bad AI code that no one understands,” he added. 

That said, if Devin can truly transform software development, $500 seems like a small price to pay.