Last week I was home sick, and as always, you have to do something when you can barely function. What better way than to spend some time trying out the Rovo Dev Agent that was in Beta? What does it do, and is it worth the hefty $20/month price tag Atlassian is asking for it? I had to find out and see how useful this little thing really is...
Setting things up in VS Code.
Said and done. I spun up my old VS Code, installed the plugins, and configured things. The plugin is called Atlassian: Jira, Rovo Dev, Bitbucket, which is a mouthful. The plugin isn't super intuitive yet and seems a bit buggy at times with connectivity, so I turned to Rovo Dev Agent.
The Rovo Dev Agent found the issue, and after some trial and error, it fixed the connectivity issue, and all worked fine. It is a very nice plugin that I recommend for every developer because it completely (well, almost) removes the need to leave your IDE. There are some things on my wishlist still, but it is a very solid plugin indeed.
Back to the Rovo dev Agent. I asked it to set up different things in VS Code and, of course, in Bitbucket, so I could get a nice structure for how to work with code for my website. Needless to say, it took some effort to get the Rovo Dev Agent to get things done. It struggled with Git quite a bit, and asking it to add another repository locally was a nightmare because I have the files hosted in a section of my harddrive that is also synced to Dropbox.
The poor Rovo Dev Agent also first created my repositories as sub-repos and then changed to singular repos, but since it has no memory, it forgot this and mixed things up a bit until it got sorted. It also struggled to set up pipelines, and I had to manually feed documentation from websites so it could get that sorted.
Working with the Rovo Dev Agent is a little like having a super enthusiastic, naive, and slightly retarded junior developer with the memory of a goldfish on your side. It can be frustrating at times and hilarious at the same time. I somehow managed to mess up a commit, and I ended up very frustrated because I could not push code from the main branch. Eventually, I just deleted the branch and resynced, and everything was fine, but there was a moment when I got frustrated.
This is what the Rovo Agent returned 🤣
Yes, I completely lost it and burst out in laughter, completely forgetting my frustration. Not only did the Rovo Agent use the most inappropriate tone towards someone cursing in frustration, but it even suggested that I change to another tool. This is an Atlassian-built agent that recommends I switch to a competing product!
Hilarious.
Once we resolved this, I worked on how I could send a Webevent to Compass. As I have a repository with archived templates, I don't want to show just general build information in Compass for that cluster of templates, but also for each template individually. This turned out to be a hilarious exercise with close to 100 attempts to solve this riddle (which, in fairness, is not very well documented and not so easy to set up).
Every attempt is phrased like hyped up Steve Ballmer on a sugar high!
Eventually, we got it done, or rather, I spoonfed the Rovo dev Agent the solution, and it took it a few attempts with carefully worded prompts to lead it to the solution. Obviously, I had to compliment the Atlassian Rovo Agent for getting things done, and the response is again world-class 🫡
Is Rovo Dev Agent worth $20/month?
My feeble usage of the Rovo dev Agent barely scratches the surface of what it can do. I used it to help me with boring git tasks, set up plugins, and configure connections between Atlassian products. I also used it to review my code when committed and to build pipelines and so on. My templates are very simple, so while it checked some code and could see problems, like finding that I had a CSS mistake that killed the Rovo Dev Agent (!!), somehow.
It is very nice to have your dev partner built in, and while I make fun of it for being a bit enthusiastic and still very junior in its output, it does help. As a new AI Agent, still learning, it is not expected to be on a higher level, and I am sure it will eventually have stronger capabilities to understand code better. As an LLM, it is not bad, and you should consider this when you make the decision.
For me, I will not invest $20 for personal use because I don't write that much code, so I can actually justify the cost (unless sponsored 😁). Is it worth the cost for a professional developer? For $20, that is not a lot of time that you need to save to break even on that cost, and I am confident that even experienced developers can easily save time using the Rovo dev Agent for it to be worth that investment.
As LLMs go, it is neither better nor worse than the competitors, or even generic LLMs. Its strength is in the deep connection with the Atlassian platform and its understanding of that. It is only going to get better with time, so if you are evaluating other LLMs for development, and you are using the Atlassian platform, then I would give the Atlassian Rovo Dev Agent a try.
Get the plugin!
Regardless of whether you want to use the Atlassian Rovo Dev Agent or not, I strongly suggest you get the Atlassian: Jira, Rovo Dev, Bitbucket plugin if you are working in VS Code. It is by far the best Atlassian plugin, and it will bring Jira into your IDE in the best possible way. I will make some videos about this soon, so check out my YouTube channel if you are interested in that.
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