After installation, onboarding offers to carry over your familiar environment - the theme, the shortcuts, the settings from VS Code or Cursor. The temptation is clear: you want the new editor to feel "like home" from the first minute. That very temptation decides whether you start with a clean, controlled environment or with a copy of someone else's problems.
The naive move is to import everything at once: since there is a "transfer settings" button, transfer the whole profile and keep working as before. It seems to save hours of setup and to spoil nothing - after all, the same settings already worked in the old editor. The import button is built precisely to make this look like the right move: it offers to transfer the whole profile, because for an ordinary editor that would indeed be reasonable.
It breaks on the fact that Devin Desktop is not just an editor but an IDE with an agent, and part of what you carried over conflicts precisely with the agent part. Conflicting AI extensions, unknown task definitions, someone else's autostart settings come along with the theme and the keys, but now they behave in an environment where an autonomous executor works alongside. Importing the interface saves hours; importing the whole profile inherits old conflicts and brings them into an environment where the cost of a conflict is higher.
The professional move is to import selectively. The theme and the familiar keybindings - yes, they are safe and immediately return comfort. Trusted formatter, linter and language server - yes, they are the working foundation. Workspace settings - only after review. And conflicting AI extensions and unknown task definitions are not carried over automatically: you enable them by hand and one at a time, once it is clear what each does. The rule is simple: a clean start is better than a full clone. The logic of selectivity is simple: you carry over what you can name and take responsibility for, and defer what you cannot say does around the agent.
A separate axis of onboarding is sign-in. Work requires a Devin account; the usual path is to log in or sign up. If the standard sign-in does not work, the documentation offers a fallback - manual sign-in with a Devin API key. This is exactly a fallback, not the main path, and it has its own security rule. It matters to keep these two paths apart: the ordinary account sign-in is interactive authorization, while the key is a long-lived secret, and one should not confuse their convenience with their cost.
The key is your permissions in portable form, and it must be handled accordingly. You enter it in the dedicated sign-in field, but never paste it into the agent chat: the agent dialog is context that is logged, may go to the model and into the session history, and a secret in it stops being a secret. The difference between the sign-in field and the chat here is not stylistic but a boundary between the private and the observable.
The cost of non-selective onboarding accumulates unnoticed. A carried-over conflicting extension quietly interferes with suggestions and edits, and then it is hard to tell whose behavior you are seeing - the agent's or an inherited plugin's. A secret that reached the chat once cannot be un-seen: it is considered compromised and rotated. Both costs are paid later and more dearly than a minute of selectivity at the start would have cost. That very delay is what makes it treacherous: an extension conflict or a key leak does not show at the moment of import but surfaces later, when the link to onboarding is no longer obvious.
You should verify the result of onboarding not by the feeling that "it looks like the old editor" but on a small, safe repository. Open a small project and confirm one by one: formatting works as expected, the test runs, the terminal opens and works, Git sees the repository. Four checks on a toy project show that the base is assembled correctly before you trust the environment with a real task. A small repository is chosen deliberately: on it the cost of a mistake is zero, and all four subsystems - the formatter, the tests, the terminal and Git - are checked in minutes and separately.
The engineering conclusion: onboarding is not a transfer of the past but the assembly of a new controlled environment in which an agent works beside you. Importing the interface returns comfort cheaply; importing the whole profile drags along what becomes a source of confusion in the new environment. Sign in through the standard account, the key only in the sign-in field and never in the chat.
The typical failures are recognizable. The whole profile is imported and then a week is spent chasing an AI-extension conflict, mistaking it for the agent's caprice. An API key is pasted into the chat "to sign in faster" and access is compromised. The check on a small repository is skipped and a broken formatter is discovered on a real task. The sign is the same: onboarding was taken for cosmetics rather than for the assembly of a working environment. Assemble it selectively and check it on a toy project, and most of these failures will not happen.