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Jonathan Harel for Fine

Posted on • Originally published at fine.dev

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Introducing Fine: the IDE of the Future

Over the past few weeks, we have been refining our product in collaboration with our early adopters. We have spent hours engaging with software engineers, CTOs, and engineering leaders. Using the feedback we gathered, we have developed a significantly improved version of Fine that we are releasing today.

Demo

The future of software engineering

In recent years, the process of software development has become increasingly complex. Developers are required to be familiar with many frameworks that serve very specific needs and change rapidly and constantly. From writing code to cloud deployment, every single developer must deal with a huge mental load. You might have seen this post on Reddit, that got a lot of attention:

Reddit Post Screenshot

The future of software engineering lies in enhancing the joy of creation, allowing developers to enter a seamless flow where they focus on “what” instead of “how”. Fine let’s AI handle routine tasks, and frees engineers to focus on problem solving. This transformation turns mundane tasks into exhilarating ones, aligning with the true purpose of our work – building valuable products and escaping the hassles of version updates and deployments.

Software 3.0 Changes The Game

Software 3.0 marks a paradigm shift. It prioritizes design over coding and brings engineers closer to the essence of their job: problem solving. At Fine we’re learning about the best practices in Software 3.0, rethinking workflows from the ground up, and codifying them into our product.

Real change comes when tools create new habits and change our behaviors.

As we transition into the era of Software 3.0, developer-oriented products increasingly concentrate on novel workflows rather than merely enhanced tools. Here's a glimpse into the Software 3.0 workflow embraced by Fine:

  1. Write Specifications: Clear specifications serve as guidelines for both AI agents and humans.
  2. Delegate to an AI Agent: Specialized AI agents handle diverse tasks and generate the majority of the code.
  3. Refine: Human oversight ensures changes align with the specifications.
  4. Ace the Last Mile: Final adjustments are made by humans before shipping.

Bring the Flow Back With Fine

Today, we're not just introducing a product; we're unveiling a new way to develop software. This approach transcends the challenges of conventional software development workflows, and reignites the passion and creativity within every developer.

Fine is available for everyone, and you can get started for free. We're continuously refining our best practices and adding more integrations to elevate your experience. Here is what you can expect from us now:

  • Every Individual Becomes an Engineering Manager: Fine enables every developer to deploy as many AI agents as they want, akin to managing a squad of experts. With identity, tools, and workflow, each AI agent becomes an efficient part of the development process, turning every developer into a squad leader.
  • Built For Teams: Fine is designed for collaboration, recognizing that software creation is a collective effort. Features like organizational memory and live collaboration are integral, facilitating a “team sport” approach to problem solving, and keeping all the context in one place.
  • Privacy First: We are committed to safeguarding your creativity. Fine doesn’t store your code - everything happens locally, keeping your innovations private and secure.

Built with the Community

Our journey with Fine has been a collaborative effort with early adopters, software engineers, CTOs, and engineering leaders. Your insights have shaped Fine, making it a product built by the community, for the community. We encourage you to keep building with us: Join our Discord community, add your agents to the agent examples repo, and spread the word on Twitter.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll build!

Top comments (4)

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church_st profile image
Church St • Edited

Hey peeps, I have been using the free plan of Fine for 2 days trying to debug an issue. I got really excited when I hooked the agent up to a branch in Github and even more excited to see the integration with pull requests.

However, 2 days was enough to discover massive issues with the AI Agent.

First big problem. For some reason all \n get re-written as \\n. And only those. \r is left alone ? To make things worse, when it takes the code with the newly changed \n it changes them to \\n. Eventually you end up with \\\n !!! Not Fine at all.

Second problem is the AI Agent does not follow instructions.

When I discovered the \\n throughout the code, I asked the AI Agent to change them back. Instead it just repeated its last response and added extra \ in the code. It did this 4 times in a row!

The next day ( yes I used all my messages up and got broken code ), I decided to ignore this issue, and just search/replace \n myself. I asked the AI Agent to Fix a problem and it did add a line, and it also claimed to change another script. But there were no changes in the additional script and I had to do a compare to find the other change it made. Sure it told me what it was going to do but it didn't show me exactly what it did.

So stupidly I asked it to show me what changed, and it went back to repeating from the start all over again.

So I wasted 2 days and was very let down because the excitement I had for the Git integration just got flattened by this AI Agent not following simple instructions.

So I think I'll come back in a years time to see if the intelligence of this agent has been updated. For now , it's just a time waster in my view :(

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leshems profile image
Dan Leshem

Thanks. I'm really excited about it!

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church_st profile image
Church St

I was too :(

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hagho profile image
HAg

Thx for sharing @jonathanhar

What is the b module here? Is Fine going to be free forever?