Three months ago, Devin made headlines for allegedly being able to complete full software engineering tasks autonomously. Skeptics were loud. But in the time since, a quiet parade of evidence has accumulated: agents really are shipping code to production.
The Stack That Makes It Possible
The secret is tool-use — the ability for a model to call external functions like file editors, terminal commands, and web search. When combined with a capable base model and a well-designed orchestration layer, you get something that can understand a bug report, locate the relevant code, write a fix, and run tests.
Which Teams Should Care Now
If your engineering team is small and your backlog is large, the ROI is already positive. The break-even point for most "code assistant" investments now sits at around 2–3 months.