Cognition CEO Scott Wu says his AI coding agent, Devin, is designed to work alongside human programmers — not replace them — even as his company raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation in May 2026.
Wu made the comments to TechCrunch shortly after the funding announcement, in which Cognition described a vision of “self-driving software development.” Despite that framing, Wu pushed back on the idea that Devin is built to make human engineers obsolete. “We’ve never thought about it as replacing humans,” he said. “It has never been our view.”
Wu, who began coding at age nine and has been described as one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers of all time, said the original concept for Devin was more collaborative. “We really just thought of it as: this is your buddy who helps you build more,” he told TechCrunch, referencing a stuffed animal on his desk that he keeps as a physical symbol of the AI tool.
He described Devin’s current capabilities as operating at “somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer,” depending on the task. Its primary role, he said, is handling long-tail maintenance work — such as updating legacy software or migrating applications between platforms — freeing human developers for more creative work.
Cognition reports that 89% of code committed by its own engineers was committed by Devin, with the remainder coming from local agents in Windsurf, an AI coding tool the company acquired last year.
Wu drew a parallel to visual development environments, which abstracted software creation away from machine-level instructions, suggesting AI agents represent a similar evolution rather than a displacement of programmers.
He also predicted that AI agents will expand into other industries — including customer service and medicine — and expressed hope that the goal in those fields would likewise be to augment workers rather than replace them. “It should always be up to the human what to do,” he said.
Source: TechCrunch