Cognition’s Scott Wu says AI coding agents should not replace humans

Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week with his two-year-old AI startup raised $1 billion at a valuation of $26 billion. Realization is the creator of Devin, one of the first and, without a doubt, the best AI coding agents. Devin, the CEO says, “he naturally has an end-to-end project.”

Instead, in blog post in announcing this upgrade, Cognition offered a vision as we “transition to a world of automated software.”

So, can Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 developer? Yes, and no, Wu told TechCrunch. “We have never thought of replacing people.

In the wild year of 2026 when every day Another tech CEO has announced his layoff in the name of AI-enabled workers, Wu says he especially doesn’t want coders to lose their jobs. “We’re all programmers,” he said. “I started painting when I was nine years old.”

In fact, Wu is recognized as one of the greatest children’s contestants of all time, according to recent history at Colossus. As a sophomore, Wu won the international math competition for seventh graders, which launched a childhood full of math and programming. It also introduced him to other wunderkinds who founded other AI tech startups, like Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.

So, he tells TechCrunch, the idea wasn’t to make human programmers obsolete.

“When we started making Devin, it was funny,” he said, “but we just thought: this is your friend who helps you make more.” Instead, he showed a small computer-sized animal, his Devin teddy bear, that he keeps on his desk. He thinks like the physical symbol of Devin AI coder “This is my friend who helps you to create more.”

Wu doesn’t want AI assistants to take the fun of programming away from people.

“It’s no secret, most programmers love building software, right?” he said. “If you ask them why, what they will really tell you is, ‘Well, it’s like I start creating things from nothing.’

Just as the development community views software development away from machine instructions, they see assistants as another clear step between visualizing a software program and creating it.

However, Cognition says that Devin’s role in his company is to deliver almost all software. The company claims that 89% of the code created by its engineers was created by Devin, and the rest is contributed by Windsurf, an AI coding competition. got it last year.

Wu explains that his assistant’s job is mainly to do the kinds of long-tail maintenance work that most developers don’t want to do anyway: bringing back old software; transferring software from one platform to another. Agents will free developers to “customize more, so they can do more in production,” he promises.

So Wu is excited about Devin’s idea of ​​”changing” human coders. Although it says it can work independently, it works “somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer” depending on the task at hand.

Regarding the concept of a self-driving program, where the agent learns and controls itself so that one day, it will perform high-level tasks (“Recursive” is the new buzzword in AI these days), Wu says. “I think we’re going through a rough patch.”

He sees agents moving into other fields where they can learn, from customer service to medicine, but he hopes the goal will be to increase human resources in those areas, too.

“Code and software will be the first movers, but we’ll see this happen in all these other industries,” he predicts. “One thing that has been clear to us from the beginning is, it has to be up to the people what they can do…