Cognition's Scott Wu says AI coding agents shouldn't replace humans

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. Cognition is the maker of Devin, one of the first and, arguably, most successful AI coding agents. Devin, the CEO says, "naturally owns tasks end to end." In fact, in the blog post announcing that raise, Cognition laid out a vision where "we are shifting to a world of self-driving software development." So, could Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 programmer?

Yes, and no, Wu told TechCrunch. "We've never thought about it as replacing humans. I know it's like a scenario, folks have said these things.

It has never been our view." Wu, who started coding at the age of nine and has been called one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers of all time, says he especially doesn't want coders to lose their jobs. "We are all programmers ourselves," he explained. "I started coding when I was nine." Wu's vision for Devin is not to make human programmers obsolete, but to create a tool that helps them build more.

"When we started building Devin, it's kind of a funny thing," he mused, "but we really just thought of it as: this is your buddy who helps you build more." Wu thinks of Devin as a physical symbol of the Devin AI coder, a stuffed animal holding a computer that he keeps on his desk. "This is my buddy that helps you build more." Wu doesn't want AI agents to take the joy of programming away from people. "It's not a secret, most software engineers love building software, right?" he said.

"If you ask them why, what they'll basically tell you is, 'Well, it's 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.'" Wu views agents as another layer of abstraction between envisioning a software product and producing it.

Cognition says that Devin's 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. Wu explains that his agent's role is largely to do the kinds of long-tail maintenance tasks that many programmers don't like to do anyway: bringing old software up to date; moving applications off one platform and onto another.