Cognition CEO Scott Wu was in the news again this week when his two-year-old AI coding agent startup raised $1 billion at a valuation of $26 billion. Cognition is the creator of Devin, one of the first and arguably most successful AI coding agents. Devin, the CEO says, “naturally owns the tasks from start to finish.”
In fact, in the blog post In announcing that increase, Cognition laid out a vision in which “we are shifting to a world of autonomous software development.”
So could Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 programmer? Yes and no, Wu told TechCrunch. “We’ve never thought about replacing humans. I know it’s like a scenario, people have said these things. It’s never been our opinion.”
In this wild year of 2026 when every day Another tech CEO announces layoffs In the name of supplanting workers with AI, Wu says he doesn’t especially want coders to lose their jobs. “We are all programmers,” he explained. “I started coding when I was nine.”
In fact, Wu has been called one of the most successful children’s competitive programmers of all time, according to a recent profile on Colossus. When he was in second grade, Wu won a national math competition for seventh graders, launching a childhood filled with math and coding tournaments. He also introduced him to other wunderkinds who launched other AI technology startups, such as Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.
So, he tells TechCrunch, the idea was never to make human programmers obsolete.
“When we started building Devin, it was kind of funny,” he reflected, “but we really thought of it as: This is your friend helping you build more.” In fact, he showed off a small stuffed animal holding a computer, his own Devin teddy bear, which he keeps on his desk. He considers it a physical symbol of the Devin AI coder: “This is my friend who helps you build more.”
Wu doesn’t want AI agents to take away the joy of programming from people.
“It’s no secret, most software engineers love creating software, right?” said. “If you ask them why, what they’ll basically tell you is, ‘Well, it’s like I can build things from nothing. I can bring the whole idea I have to life and turn it into a product. I can turn it into an experience.'”
Just as visual development environments abstracted software creation from machine instructions, he sees agents as another layer of abstraction between the conception of a software product and its production.
However, Cognition says that Devin’s role in his own company is to distribute almost all of the software. The company says that 89% of the code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin and the rest by local agents from Windsurf, the AI coding competitor. acquired last year.
Wu explains that his agent’s role is largely to perform the kind of long-tail maintenance tasks that many programmers don’t like to do anyway: updating old software; move applications from one platform to another. The agents will be programmers free “of much of the work, so they will be able to do much more in the creation part,” he promises.
That’s why Wu resents the idea of Devin “replacing” human coders. While it says it can work independently, it works “somewhere between a junior engineer and a mid-level engineer,” depending on the task at hand.
Regarding the concept of autonomous driving software, where the agent learns and improves itself so that one day it functions at higher levels (“recursive” is the latest buzzword in AI these days), says Wu. “I think we’re in for a wild ride.”
He sees agents entering other fields where they will learn tasks, from customer service to medicine, but he hopes the goal will be to increase human workers in those areas as well.
“Code and software have been the first to move, but we’ll see this happen in all these other industries,” he predicts. “One thing we’ve been clear about from the beginning is that it should always be the human decision what to do… you really see this in software engineering, but I think it’s true in all these other professions as well.”
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