Carl Brown

Carl Brown is a veteran software engineer, with decades of industry experience, who runs the YouTube channel Internet of Bugs. He built a following as a plain-spoken skeptic of Silicon Valley hype, dissecting exaggerated claims about developer tools with the patience of someone who has shipped software for a living.

The Devin teardown

In 2024 Brown drew wide attention with a detailed teardown of a promotional demo for Devin, billed as “the world’s first AI software engineer.” Reviewing the tool’s own showcase, he found that Devin had not actually completed the freelance task it was advertised as solving — instead generating errors in its own code and then fixing them, and taking hours on work whose framing was misleading. The original poster of the task later released a video supporting his findings.

Brown’s broader argument is not that AI is useless but that its coding abilities are routinely oversold. He warns that demos are staged, benchmarks are gamed, and non-engineers cannot easily tell working software from a convincing-looking failure — a caution that lands him among AI’s pointed critics even as he remains a working technologist.