Cognition’s Scott Wu on how Devin, the AI software engineer, will work for you

Scott Wu loves code. He grew up competing in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and is a world class coder, and now he's building an AI agent designed to create more, not fewer, human engineers. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk to Scott, the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, an AI lab focusing on reasoning. Recently, the Cognition team released a demo of Devin, an AI software engineer that can increasingly handle entire tasks end to end.

In this episode, they talk about why the team built Devin with a UI that mimics looking over another engineer’s shoulder as they work and how this transparency makes for a better result. Scott discusses why he thinks Devin will make it possible for there to be more human engineers in the world, and what will be important for software engineers to focus on as these roles evolve. They also get into how Scott thinks about building the Cognition team and that they’re just getting started. 

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Show Notes: 

(0:00) Introduction

(1:12) IOI training and community

(6:39) Cognition’s founding team

(8:20) Meet Devin

(9:17) The discourse around Devin

(12:14) Building Devin’s UI

(14:28) Devin’s strengths and weakness 

(18:44) The evolution of coding agents

(22:43) Tips for human engineers

(26:48) Hiring at Cognition