TLDR: Treat Devin like a junior engineer. Assign Devin tasks a junior engineer or intern could figure out if provided with sufficient, clear instructions. Remember to instruct Devin with the level of detail that you would give to a human coworker. For more comprehensive guidance on working effectively with coding agents, see our Coding Agents 101 guide.
Start your day by putting multiple
Devins to work in parallel:
Think through your TODOs, and carve out small tasks that a team of interns (Devins) can help with.
Return to draft PRs waiting for review around lunch.
Tag Devin on Slack threads for quick
fixes:
Devin is great for tasks that take 30 minutes but often end up in large backlogs for weeks.
Focus on easily verifiable
tasks:
Ideally, it’s as easy as checking that CI passes or testing an automatic deployment. Avoid ambiguous tasks where it can seem like the task was completed properly but something else is happening.
Start small:
As you’re getting started, start many small runs to find the best use cases for Devin.
Try not to spend too many (>10) ACUs on one run. Devin’s performance degrades in long sessions.