SAN FRANCISCO — Cognition CEO Scott Wu outlined his company's vision for its AI coding agent Devin as a collaborative tool designed to assist rather than replace software engineers during a 2026 interview.

"We've never thought about it as replacing humans. I know it's like a scenario, folks have said these things. It has never been our view," Wu said. He described Devin, which Cognition calls one of the first and most successful AI coding agents, as a supportive partner in the software development process. According to company-reported metrics, 89% of code committed by Cognition’s engineers was generated by Devin, with the remainder handled by local agents from Windsurf, an AI coding competitor Cognition acquired in 2025.

Devin functions somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer depending on the task and is primarily tasked with long-tail maintenance work, such as modernizing legacy software and migrating applications across platforms. Wu characterized the AI as "this is your buddy who helps you build more." He noted that software engineers often describe their passion as the ability to build something from nothing—an experience he believes Devin enhances rather than diminishes.

"Agents will free programmers from a lot of the toil, and so they can do much more of the creation side," he said.

Wu also expressed broader ambitions for AI agents beyond software engineering, predicting their expansion into fields like customer service and medicine while maintaining human oversight. "Code and software has been the first to move, but we'll see this happen in all these other industries. One thing that's been clear to us since the beginning is, it should always be up to the human what to do … you really see this in software engineering, but I think it's true in all these other professions too," he said.

Cognition raised $1 billion in 2026 at a $26 billion valuation.