A talk for developers

Build great things
with Devin

What changes when every developer has an AI software engineer with its own computer, working next to them.

Horacio Herrerahoracioh.com
01 The shift

You stop typing every line and start directing the work.

Autocomplete

Suggests the next few lines while you type.

Chat assistant

Answers questions. You copy, paste, run and fix.

Devin

Takes the whole task: plans, codes, runs, tests, and opens a pull request.

02 Its own computer

A teammate with a full dev machine

Every session runs on its own VM with a shell, editor, browser and desktop. Devin installs dependencies, runs your app and your tests, and checks the result in the browser.

H
You from your phone
Add a “schedule from photo” option to the class import wizard.
D
Devin
On it. I’ll read the wizard code first.
  • Explored repo, found the import flow
  • Implemented upload and parsing step
  • Lint, types and tests pass
  • Clicking through it in the browser
03 Start from anywhere

Meet it where you already work

Web & mobile

Start and steer sessions from a browser or your phone.

Slack & Teams

Mention Devin in a thread and it replies with progress.

@Devin fix the flaky test

Linear & Jira

Hand off tickets straight from the backlog.

API & CLI

Create sessions from scripts, CI or your terminal.

curl -fsSL cli.devin.ai/install.sh

This deck started as one message from my phone.

04 Understand first

Ask your codebase anything

Ask Devin

Questions about how your code works, answered with citations to real files. Then turn the answer into a plan and hand it to an agent session.


“How does a trial booking reach the calendar?”

DeepWiki

Auto-generated, always-current docs for every repo: architecture, key concepts and diagrams. Onboard to a new codebase in an afternoon.


deepwiki.com/<owner>/<repo>

05 Prompt to pull request

It doesn’t stop at the first commit

Devin opens the PR, then watches CI, fixes what breaks and replies to review comments until the PR is ready to merge. You review finished work.

feat: self-serve Gymdesk import wizard + schedule from photo
horacioh/bjj-scheduler · opened by Devin
Typecheck and unit tests
E2E failed, fix pushed by Devin
E2E re-run passed
2 review comments addressed
Ready to merge
06 Proof, not promises

It shows you that it works

Devin clicks through your app like a user and sends a recording with captions and auto-zoom, with idle time cut out. Watch 40 seconds instead of checking out the branch.

Import schedule
Step 3 · Upload a photo of the timetable
07 A second pair of eyes

Review and scan, not only write

Devin Review

Comment /devin review on any pull request and get bugs and risky changes flagged inline, with suggested fixes.

Code scans

Sweep a whole repo for security issues, slow queries, dead code, missing test coverage and quality problems, then let Devin fix what it finds.

08 It learns your team

Gets better every session

Knowledge

Facts about your repos and conventions, recalled when they’re relevant.

Skills & playbooks

Repeatable recipes: “how we deploy”, “how we write migrations”.

Memory

Remembers how you like to work, across every session.

Blueprints

Your environment as config, so each session boots ready to run.

09 Plugs into your stack

Connected to the tools you use

Through the MCP marketplace Devin can read the Sentry error, query the database, check the dashboard and open the spec, all in one session.

Monitoring

Sentry, Datadog, PagerDuty

Data

PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB

Docs & tickets

Notion, Confluence, Linear, Jira

Your own

Any MCP server you build

10 Scale out

One developer, many sessions at once.

Parallel sessions

Fix the bug, write the docs and spike the feature at the same time.

Child sessions

Devin splits a big task, hands out the pieces and checks the results.

Workflows

Scripted pipelines for migrations and batch changes across many files or repos.

11 Automations

Work that happens while you sleep

Trigger
CI fails on main, a message in #bugs, or every morning at 7
Conditions
Only this repo, only issues labelled bug
Preflight check
A quick filter decides if it’s worth a session
Action
Devin investigates, fixes and opens a PR, or posts a summary
12 What I built with it

Real projects, real pull requests

bjj-scheduler

GymClass

Gym management app. Devin shipped a Gymdesk import wizard, schedule-from-photo and rank systems as stacked PRs.

PR #276 →
vivienda-es

Housing law tracker

A daily automation finds Spanish housing law changes and publishes the news to Seed.

PR #25 →
horacioh.com

Personal site

Rebuilt from Gatsby to Astro, with content pulled from Seed at build time.

PR #60 →
seed

Seed Hypermedia

Deploy and ops fixes on the self-hosted fork of a peer-to-peer publishing app.

PR #43 →
13 Getting great results

Brief it like a great teammate

Say what “done” looks like

“Tests pass and the import shows 20 classes” beats “make the import work”.

Point to the right place

Name the files, the similar feature, the doc. Context is the cheapest speed-up.

Start small, then scale

Bugs and chores first. Once you trust the loop, hand over features, then run them in parallel.

Teach it once

Turn every correction into knowledge or a skill so it never repeats the mistake.

Your turn

What will you build?

The limit is no longer how fast you can type. It’s how many good ideas you’re willing to try. Pick the project you never had time for, and start it tonight.

devin.aidocs.devin.aiHoracio Herrera
Speaker notes
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