Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week when the 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, says the CEO, “naturally owns the operations from end to end.”
Yes, in blog post In announcing this increase, Cognition presented a vision where “we are moving into a self-driving software development world.”
So could Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 developer? Yes and no, Wu told TechCrunch. “We never thought of it as replacing people. I know it’s like a script, people have said those things. It was never our view.”
In this wild year of 2026, when every day another tech CEO is announcing layoffs in the name of replacing workers with artificial intelligence, Wu says he especially doesn’t want coders to lose their jobs. “We’re all programmers ourselves,” he explained. “I started coding when I was nine.”
In fact, Wu has been named one of the most accomplished children’s competitive programmers of all time, according to a recent profile on Colossus. As a second grader, Wu won a national math competition for seventh graders, which began a childhood filled with math and programming tournaments. It also introduced him to other wunderkinds who went on to launch other AI technology startups, such as Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.
So, he tells TechCrunch, the idea was never to make human developers obsolete.
“When we started building Devin, it was kind of funny,” he reflected, “but we really thought of it as: this is your friend who helps you build more.” In fact, he pointed to a small stuffed animal holding a computer, his own teddy bear Devin, that he keeps on his desk. He thinks of it as 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 the joy of programming away from humans.
“It’s no secret, most software engineers love building software, right?” he said. “If you ask them why, what they’ll basically say is, ‘Well, it’s like I’m making things out of nothing. I can make all my idea that I have and turn it into a product. I can turn it into an experience.”
Just as visual development environments abstract software creation away from machine instructions, it sees agents as another layer of abstraction between the vision of a software product and its production.
However, Cognition says Devin’s role at its own company is to ship almost all of the software. The company says 89% of the code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin, and the rest by local agents at Windsurf, the AI coding competitor it acquired last year.
Wu explains that his rep’s role is largely to do the kinds of long-tail maintenance work that many developers don’t like to do anyway: updating old software. moving applications from one platform to another. Agents will free developers “from a lot of drudgery, so they can do a lot more on the creation side,” he promises.
So Wu feeds into Devin’s idea of ”replacing” the human coders. While he says he can operate independently, he operates “somewhere between a junior and mid-level engineer” depending on the task he’s performing.
As for the concept of self-driving software, where the agent learns and improves, so that one day, it functions at higher levels (“recursive” is the buzzword in AI these days), Wu says. “I think we’re in for a crazy 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 workers in those fields.
“Code and software were the first movers, but we’re going to see it happen in all these other industries,” he predicts. “One thing that was clear to us from the beginning is that it should always be up to the person what to do … you really see that in software engineering, but I think it’s true in all these other professions as well.”
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