Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines once more this week when his two-year-old AI coding agent startup raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. Cognition is the maker of Devin, one of many first and, arguably, most profitable AI coding brokers. Devin, the CEO says, “naturally owns duties finish to finish.”
The truth is, within the blog post saying that increase, Cognition laid out a imaginative and prescient the place “we’re shifting to a world of self-driving software program improvement.”
So, might Devin change, say, a mid-level L4 programmer? Sure, and no, Wu informed TechCrunch. “We’ve by no means considered it as changing people. I do know it’s like a state of affairs, of us have stated this stuff. It has by no means been our view.”
On this wild 12 months of 2026 when every single day one other tech CEO publicizes layoffs within the identify of supplanting staff with AI, Wu says he particularly doesn’t need coders to lose their jobs. “We’re all programmers ourselves,” he defined. “I began coding after I was 9.”
The truth is, Wu has been known as some of the achieved baby aggressive programmers of all time, in accordance with a recent profile in Colossus. As a second-grader, Wu received a nationwide math competitors for seventh-graders, which launched a childhood stuffed with math and programming tournaments. It additionally launched him to different wunderkinds who went on to launch different AI tech startups, like Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.
So, he tells TechCrunch, the thought was by no means to make human programmers out of date.
“Once we began constructing Devin, it’s form of humorous factor,” he mused, “however we actually simply considered it as: that is your buddy who helps you construct extra.” The truth is, he confirmed off just a little stuffed animal holding a pc, his personal Devin teddy bear of types, that he retains on his desk. He thinks of it as a bodily image of the Devin AI coder “That is my buddy that helps you construct extra.”
Wu doesn’t need AI brokers to take the enjoyment of programming away from folks.
“It’s not a secret, most software program engineers love constructing software program, proper?” he stated. “In case you ask them why, what they’ll mainly let you know is, ‘Properly, it’s like I get to construct issues from nothing. I could make my complete concept that I’ve, and switch it right into a product. I can flip it into an expertise.’”
Identical to visible improvement environments abstracted software program creation away from machine directions, he views brokers as one other layer of abstraction between envisioning a software program product and producing it.
But, Cognition says that Devin’s position in its personal firm is to ship almost all of the software program. The corporate says that 89% of code dedicated by its engineers was dedicated by Devin, and the remaining by native brokers in Windsurf, the AI coding competitor it acquired final 12 months.
Wu explains that his agent’s position is essentially to do the sorts of long-tail upkeep duties that many programmers don’t love to do anyway: bringing outdated software program updated; shifting purposes off one platform and onto one other. Brokers will free programmers “from a whole lot of the toil, and to allow them to do far more of the creation facet,” he guarantees.
So Wu bristles on the concept of Devin “changing” human coders. Whereas he says it could actually work independently, it really works at “someplace between a junior and a mid-level engineer” relying on the duty at hand.
As for the idea of self-driving software program, the place the agent learns and improves itself in order that at some point, it’s going to work at larger ranges (“recursive” is the most recent buzzword in AI lately), Wu says. “I feel we’re in for a wild experience.”
He sees brokers coming into different fields the place they’ll study duties, from customer support to drugs, however hopes the objective will probably be to enhance human staff in these areas, too.
“Code and software program has been the primary to maneuver, however we’ll see this occur in all these different industries,” he predicts. “One factor that’s been clear to us for the reason that starting is, it ought to all the time be as much as the human what to do … you actually see this in software program engineering, however I feel it’s true in all these different professions too.”
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