Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition, has once again captured attention this week as his two-year-old AI coding agent startup successfully closed a funding round, securing $1 billion at an impressive $26 billion valuation. Cognition is renowned as the creator of Devin, recognized as one of the pioneering and arguably most effective AI coding agents. According to Wu, Devin possesses the unique capability to “naturally own tasks end to end.”
In a blog post accompanying the funding announcement, Cognition articulated a forward-looking vision, stating their belief that “we are shifting to a world of self-driving software development.”
Addressing the pressing question of whether Devin could potentially replace, for example, a mid-level L4 programmer, Wu provided a nuanced response to TechCrunch, saying, "Yes, and no." He clarified, “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.”
In a year like 2026, marked by frequent announcements of tech CEOs implementing layoffs with the explicit aim of substituting human workers with AI, Wu emphasized his particular desire for coders not to lose their jobs. He explained, “We are all programmers ourselves,” adding, “I started coding when I was nine.”
Indeed, a recent profile in Colossus hailed Wu as one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers ever. At just a second-grader, Wu triumphed in a nationwide math competition designed for seventh-graders, an achievement that set the stage for a childhood immersed in math and programming tournaments. This journey also connected him with other prodigious talents who would later establish their own AI tech startups, such as Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI.
Thus, as he conveyed to TechCrunch, the fundamental intention behind Devin was never to render human programmers obsolete.
“When we started building Devin, it’s kind of funny thing,” Wu mused, “but we really just thought of it as: this is your buddy who helps you build more.” To illustrate this point, he proudly displayed a small stuffed animal clutching a computer—a sort of Devin teddy bear—which resides on his desk, serving as a tangible representation of the AI coder. “This is my buddy that helps you build more,” he reiterated.
Wu is resolute in his desire that AI agents should not diminish the inherent joy people find in programming.
“It’s not a secret, most software engineers love building software, right?” he questioned. “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.’”
Drawing a parallel to how visual development environments abstracted software creation away from complex machine instructions, Wu perceives AI agents as another vital layer of abstraction, bridging the gap between conceptualizing a software product and bringing it to fruition.
Internally, Cognition itself demonstrates Devin’s profound impact, reporting that the agent is responsible for shipping nearly all of the company’s software. Specifically, 89% of the code committed by its engineers was attributed to Devin, with the remaining portion handled by local agents from Windsurf, the AI coding competitor Cognition acquired last year.
Wu elaborated that Devin’s primary function involves tackling the extensive, often tedious, maintenance tasks that many programmers prefer to avoid. These include updating legacy software and migrating applications between different platforms. He promised that agents would liberate programmers “from a lot of the toil, and so they can do much more of the creation side.”
Consequently, Wu strongly objects to the notion of Devin "replacing" human coders. While acknowledging Devin's capacity to operate autonomously, he characterizes its performance level as "somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer," depending on the specific task.
Regarding the ambitious concept of "self-driving software"—where an agent continuously learns and improves itself to eventually operate at more advanced levels (a process often dubbed "recursive" in contemporary AI discourse)—Wu remarked, “I think we are in for a wild ride.”
He envisions AI agents expanding into diverse sectors, mastering tasks ranging from customer service to medicine, always with the hope that their ultimate goal will be to augment, rather than replace, human workers in these fields.
“Code and software has been the first to move, but we’ll see this happen in all these other industries,” he predicted. “One thing that’s been clear to us since the beginning is, it should always be up to the human what to do … you really see this in software engineering, but I think it’s true in all these other professions too.”
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