Fresh from raising $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, Cognition CEO Scott Wu pushed back against the narrative that his AI coding agent Devin is designed to replace human programmers. Wu, described as one of the most accomplished competitive programmers of his generation, said the original vision was simply to build a collaborator that helps engineers create more.
Wu acknowledged that Devin currently operates at somewhere between a junior and mid-level engineer, handling long-tail maintenance tasks — legacy migrations, platform transitions — that most developers find tedious rather than fulfilling. At Cognition itself, Devin accounts for 89% of committed code, with the remainder handled by local agents in Windsurf, the AI coding tool Cognition acquired last year.
Looking ahead, Wu predicted AI agents would expand into customer service, medicine, and other industries, but maintained that human judgement should always remain in control — a principle he argued applies as much to software engineering as to any other profession.
