Mike from Vesta (first demo video) claims Devin saved "at least a hundred hours" debugging API integrations. That seems crazy to me - API integrations rarely take that long, and any engineer would spot issues like wrong API keys almost immediately. The tool might be more valuable for non-engineers creating initial drafts, but by the time you've written all the detailed specs for Devin, a mid-level engineer could have made significant progress on the task.
I wish API integrations never took that long! But it's dependent on who you're integrating with and what your product looks like. I'm the engineering manager of the payroll integrations team at a company that does workplace savings plans.
Sometimes even when you're making calls to dozens of different endpoints they're easy, but other times, you end up guessing at how to access undocumented functionality within a GraphQL API that has introspection turned off, or working around entity modeling that's completely different from your system and requires a lot of translation. Or you work with an API whose indexes variably start from 1, 0, -1, and -2 in different endpoints. These generally aren't hard technical challenges to solve, and something like Devin that could take care of most surface-level problems you see while integrating with some XML API from 2007 would be welcome.
There are companies like https://www.tryfinch.com and https://www.merge.dev that try to solve these issues, but their abstractions also reduce flexibility and aren't a perfect for all HRIS integration use cases right now.
It handles the API-specific complexities (auth, retries, webhooks, per-customer config, pre-built templates) but allows you to implement the exact use case + data model you need.
I doubt Devin could write an integration for an underspecified legacy API like that. Whenever I have had to, I've needed to talk to support/engineering on the other side.
that's definitely still the case. devin drafts my emails for issues it runs into (which i tell it to do) and i send them off.
this is definitely slower than if i were doing it full time, but i run a company. i go from customer meeting to customer meeting and spend 5-10 min a day taking whatever is blocking devin and pasting it into an email to the partner to get a response for devin.
Debugging is a pretty vague word. I know a LOT of api endpoints with shit documentation. Could Devin generate documentation for a vast number of api endpoints that could have theoretically taken a hundred hours to write?
