GoKawiilCognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week when his two-year-old AI coding agent startup raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. Cognition is the maker of Devin, one of the first and, arguably, most successful AI coding agents. Devin, the CEO says, “naturally owns tasks end to end.”
In fact, in the blog post announcing that raise, Cognition laid out a vision where “we are shifting to a world of self-driving software development.”
So, could Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 programmer? Yes, and no, Wu told TechCrunch. “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.”
In this wild year of 2026 when every day another tech CEO announces layoffs in the name of supplanting workers with AI, Wu says he especially doesn’t want coders to lose their jobs. “We are all programmers ourselves,” he explained. “I started coding when I was nine.”
In fact, Wu has been called one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers of all time, according to a recent profile in Colossus. As a second-grader, Wu won a nationwide math competition for seventh-graders, which launched a childhood filled with math and programming tournaments. It also introduced him to other wunderkinds who went on to launch other AI tech startups, like Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.
So, he tells TechCrunch, the idea was never to make human programmers obsolete.
“When we started building Devin, it’s kind of funny thing,” he mused, “but we really just thought of it as: this is your buddy who helps you build more.” In fact, he showed off a little stuffed animal holding a computer, his own Devin teddy bear of sorts, that he keeps on his desk. He thinks of it as a physical symbol of the Devin AI coder “This is my buddy that helps you build more.”
Wu doesn’t want AI agents to take the joy of programming away from people.
“It’s not a secret, most software engineers love building software, right?” he said. “If you ask them why, what they’ll basically tell you is, ‘Well, it’s like I get to build things from nothing. I can make my whole idea that I have, and turn it into a product. I can turn it into an experience.’”
Just like visual development environments abstracted software creation away from machine instructions, he views agents as another layer of abstraction between envisioning a software product and producing it.
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