Explore the shift from manual coding to AI-driven development. This session covers the mechanics of AI coding agents like OpenHands, best practices for using them effectively without accumulating tech debt, and practical use cases, emphasizing the continued importance of human oversight and critical thinking in software engineering.
Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition AI, discusses the exponential growth of AI capabilities in software engineering, likening it to a "Moore's Law for AI agents" with a doubling time of every 70 days. He chronicles the evolution of their AI agent, Devin, from handling repetitive code migrations to autonomously managing entire backlogs, highlighting the key technical challenges and paradigm shifts at each stage.
Misha Laskin, co-founder of Reflection AI and former researcher at Google DeepMind, discusses the company's mission to build superhuman autonomous systems. He introduces Asimov, a code comprehension agent designed to solve the 80% of an engineer's time spent on understanding complex systems, rather than just code generation. Laskin delves into the intricacies of co-designing product and research, the critical role of customer-driven evaluations, the bottlenecks in scaling reinforcement learning (RL) — particularly the "reward problem" — and why he believes the future is one of "jagged superintelligence" emerging in specific, high-value domains like coding.
Push Kohli and Máté Balog from Google DeepMind discuss AlphaDev, an AI agent that uses large language models and evolutionary search to discover novel, more efficient algorithms for fundamental computer science problems, marking a significant step in AI's ability to generate creative and practical solutions.