Devin writes 89% of code — and Cognition says humans still matter
cognition's devin agent now writes 89% of its own committed code, yet ceo scott wu insists the tool augments rather than replaces human engineers.
cognition raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation for its ai agent devin, which wu claims commits 89% of the company's code while handling unwanted tasks like legacy updates and platform migrations. wu rejected the narrative that ai will replace programmers, arguing that devin acts as an abstraction layer—much like visual development tools did in the past—to augment human capabilities rather than eliminate them. this perspective attempts to redefine the agent's role from a labor substitute to a 'buddy' that handles long-tail drudgery, allowing humans to focus on high-level product creation and architecture. however, the capability for an agent to ship nearly all software autonomously highlights the mounting tension between augmentation and displacement in the software engineering lifecycle.