> Being able to refactor things with only a couple sentences is remarkably fast.

I'm curious, this is js/ts? Asking because depending on the lang, good old machine refactoring is either amazeballs (Java + IDE) or non-existent (Haskell).

I'm not js/ts so I don't know what the state of machine refactoring is in VS code ... But if it's as good as Java then "a couple of sentences" is quite slow compared to a keystroke or a quick dialog box with completion of symbol names.

I'm using TypeScript. In my case, these refactors are usually small and only spanning up to 5 files depending on how interdependent things are. The benefit with an Agent is it's ability to find and detect related side effects caused by the refactor (broken type-safety, broken translation strings, etc.) and renaming for related things, like an actual UI string if it's tied to the naming of what I'm working on, and my changes happened to include a rename.

It's not always right, but I find it helpful when it finds related changes that I should be making anyway, but may have overlooked.

Another example: selecting a block that I need to wrap (or unwrap) with tedious syntax, say I need to memoize a value with a React `useMemo` hook. I can select the value, open Quick Chat, type "memoize this", and within milliseconds it's correctly wrapped and saved me lots of fiddling on the keyboard. Scale this to hundreds of changes like these over a week, it adds up to valuable time-savings.

Even more powerful: selecting 5, 10, 20 separate values and typing: "memoize all of these" and watching it blast through each one in record time with pinpoint accuracy.

IntelliJ has keyboard shortcuts for all of these. I think how impressed you are by AI depends a lot on the quality of the tooling you were previously working with.

Is work paying for Devin or you are? How pricey is it to delegate the task example you gave?

Work is. I actually don't have access to our billing, so I couldn't tell you exactly, but it depends on how many ACUs (Agent Compute Units) you've used.

We use a Team plan ($500 /mo), which includes 250 ACUs per month. Each bug or small task consumes anywhere between 1-3 ACUs, and fewer units are consumed if you're more precise with your prompt upfront. A larger prompt will usually use fewer ACUs because follow-up prompts cause Devin to run more checks to validate its work. Since it can run scripts, compilers, linters, etc. in its own VM -- all of that contributes to usage. It can also run E2E tests in a browser instance, and validate UI changes visually.

They recommend most tasks should stay under 5 ACUs before it becomes inefficient. I've managed to give it some fairly complex tasks while staying under that threshold.

So anywhere between $2-6 per task usually.