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

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.”

In truth, within the weblog publish asserting that elevate, Cognition laid out a imaginative and prescient the place “we’re shifting to a world of self-driving software program improvement.”

So, might Devin exchange, say, a mid-level L4 programmer? Sure, and no, Wu advised Trendster. “We’ve by no means thought of it as changing people. I do know it’s like a situation, people have mentioned this stuff. It has by no means been our view.”

On this wild 12 months of 2026 when each day one other tech CEO declares 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 once I was 9.”

In truth, Wu has been referred to as one of the vital completed little one aggressive programmers of all time, in line with a latest 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So, he tells Trendster, the concept was by no means to make human programmers out of date.

“After we began constructing Devin, it’s type of a humorous factor,” he mused, “however we actually simply considered it as: that is your buddy who helps you construct extra.” In truth, he confirmed off a bit of stuffed animal holding a pc, his personal Devin teddy bear of kinds, 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 individuals.

“It’s not a secret, most software program engineers love constructing software program, proper?” he mentioned. “For those who ask them why, what they’ll principally inform you is, ‘Effectively, 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 previous software program updated; transferring purposes off one platform and onto one other. Brokers will free programmers “from plenty of the toil, and to allow them to do rather more of the creation facet,” he guarantees.

So Wu bristles on the thought of Devin “changing” human coders. Whereas he says it may 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 someday it would work at increased ranges (“recursive” is the newest buzzword in AI today), Wu says. “I believe we’re in for a wild trip.”

He sees brokers coming into different fields the place they are going to study duties, from customer support to drugs, however hopes the objective can 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 because the starting is, it ought to at all times be as much as the human what to do … you actually see this in software program engineering, however I believe it’s true in all these different professions too.”