Inside Devin: The AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code this year | Scott Wu

Cognition CEO Scott Wu says Devin already writes 25% of company PRs and will exceed 50% by year-end on a 15-person team.

• Devin merges several hundred PRs/month at Cognition; currently ~25% of all PRs, targeting >50% by end of 2025.
• Each of Cognition’s 15 engineers runs up to 5 Devins concurrently, treating them as async junior teammates.
• Cognition went through ~8 pivots within the coding-agent space before landing on the current Devin product form.
• Co-founder Walden was an early Cursor engineer; co-founder Steven was an early Scale AI engineer — team met via competitive programming.
• Wu argues AI lacks hardware-distribution friction unlike PC/internet/mobile, making its growth curve far more explosive.
• Devin can spawn child Devin instances via API, enabling parallelized subtask execution within a shared context.
• Wu frames the engineer role shift as bricklayer-to-architect: the interesting 10% (architecture, problem definition) expands; the 90% (debugging, migrations, bug fixes) gets delegated.
• To hire a key MIT junior, Wu flew to North Carolina and had dinner with the candidate’s parents to negotiate a school-plus-work arrangement.

2025-05-04 · Watch on YouTube