Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines once more this week when his two-year-old AI coding agent startup secured $1 billion in funding at a $26 billion valuation. Cognition is the company behind Devin, one of the earliest and arguably most successful AI coding agents available. Devin, according to the CEO, “naturally owns tasks end to end.”

In the blog post announcing this funding round, Cognition outlined a vision where “we are shifting to a world of self-driving software development.”

So, could Devin potentially replace, for instance, a mid-level L4 programmer? “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 turbulent year of 2026, where tech CEOs announce layoffs daily under the guise of replacing workers with AI, Wu emphasizes he doesn’t want coders to lose their jobs. “We are all programmers ourselves,” he explained. “I started coding when I was nine.”

Wu has been described as one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers of all time, according to a recent profile in Colossus. As a second-grader, he won a nationwide math competition intended for seventh-graders, launching a childhood filled with math and programming tournaments. This also introduced him to other prodigies who later founded AI tech startups, such as Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang. “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.” He even showed off a small stuffed animal holding a computer—a Devin teddy bear of sorts—that he keeps on his desk. He views it as a physical representation of the Devin AI coder: “This is my buddy that helps you build more.”

Wu doesn’t want AI agents to strip away the joy of programming 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 as 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. Yet, Cognition reports that Devin’s role within its own company is to ship nearly all the software. The company states that 89% of code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin, with the remainder handled by local agents in Windsurf, the AI coding competitor it acquired last year. Wu explains that his agent primarily handles the long-tail maintenance tasks many programmers dislike anyway: updating old software, moving applications from one platform to another. Agents will free programmers “from a lot of the toil, and so they can do much more of the creation side,” he promises.

So Wu bristles at the notion of Devin “replacing” human coders. While he says it can work independently, it operates at “somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer” depending on the task. As for the concept of self-driving software, where the agent learns and improves itself so that one day it will work at higher levels (“recursive” is the latest buzzword in AI these days), Wu says, “I think we are in for a wild ride.”

He sees agents expanding into other fields where they will learn tasks, from customer service to medicine, but hopes the goal will be to augment human workers in those areas too. “Code and software has been the first to move, but we’ll see this happen in all these other industries,” he predicts. “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.”