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Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week when his two-year-old AI coding agent startup raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation<\/a>. Cognition is the maker of Devin, one of the first and, arguably, most successful AI coding agents. Devin, the CEO says, \u201cnaturally owns tasks end to end.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, in the blog post<\/a> announcing that raise, Cognition laid out a vision where \u201cwe are shifting to a world of self-driving software development.\u201d<\/p>\n So, could Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 programmer? Yes, and no, Wu told TechCrunch. \u201cWe\u2019ve never thought about it as replacing humans. I know it\u2019s like a scenario, folks have said these things. It has never been our view.\u201d<\/p>\n In this wild year of 2026 when every day another tech CEO announces layoffs<\/a> in the name of supplanting workers with AI, Wu says he especially doesn\u2019t want coders to lose their jobs. \u201cWe are all programmers ourselves,\u201d he explained. \u201cI started coding when I was nine.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, Wu has been called one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers of all time, according to a recent profile in Colossus<\/a>. As a second-grader, Wu won a nationwide math competition for seventh-graders, which launched a childhood filled with math and programming tournaments. It also introduced him to other wunderkinds who went on to launch other AI tech startups, like Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.<\/p>\n So, he tells TechCrunch, the idea was never to make human programmers obsolete.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we started building Devin, it\u2019s kind of a funny thing,\u201d he mused, \u201cbut we really just thought of it as: this is your buddy who helps you build more.\u201d In fact, he showed off a little stuffed animal holding a computer, his own Devin teddy bear of sorts, that he keeps on his desk. He thinks of it as a physical symbol of the Devin AI coder \u201cThis is my buddy that helps you build more.\u201d<\/p>\n Wu doesn\u2019t want AI agents to take the joy of programming away from people. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not a secret, most software engineers love building software, right?\u201d he said. \u201cIf you ask them why, what they\u2019ll basically tell you is, \u2018Well, it\u2019s like I get to build things from nothing. I can make my whole idea that I have, and turn it into a product. I can turn it into an experience.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Just like visual development environments abstracted software creation away from machine instructions, he views agents as another layer of abstraction between envisioning a software product and producing it.<\/p>\n Yet, Cognition says that Devin\u2019s role in its own company is to ship nearly all the software. The company says that 89% of code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin, and the rest by local agents in Windsurf, the AI coding competitor it acquired last year.<\/a><\/p>\n Wu explains that his agent\u2019s role is largely to do the kinds of long-tail maintenance tasks that many programmers don\u2019t like to do anyway: bringing old software up to date; moving applications off one platform and onto another. Agents will free programmers \u201cfrom a lot of the toil, and so they can do much more of the creation side,\u201d he promises.<\/p>\n So Wu bristles at the idea of Devin \u201creplacing\u201d human coders. While he says it can work independently, it works at \u201csomewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer\u201d depending on the task at hand.<\/p>\n As for the concept of self-driving software, where the agent learns and improves itself so that one day it will work at higher levels (\u201crecursive\u201d is the latest buzzword in AI these days<\/a>), Wu says. \u201cI think we are in for a wild ride.\u201d<\/p>\n He sees agents entering other fields where they will learn tasks, from customer service to medicine, but hopes the goal will be to augment human workers in those areas, too.<\/p>\n \u201cCode and software has been the first to move, but we\u2019ll see this happen in all these other industries,\u201d he predicts. \u201cOne thing that\u2019s been clear to us since the beginning is, it should always be up to the human what to do \u2026 you really see this in software engineering, but I think it\u2019s true in all these other professions too.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n