Cognition’s Scott Wu says AI coding agents shouldn’t replace humans

Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week when he started his two-year-old AI coding agent. It raised $1 billion at a valuation of $26 billion. Cognition is the maker of Devin, one of the first and most successful AI encryption agents. “He naturally takes on tasks from start to finish,” says Devin, the CEO.

In fact, in Blog post In announcing this increase, Cognition laid out a vision where “we move into the world of self-driving software development.”

So, could Devin replace a level 4 programmer, for example? Yes and no, Wu told TechCrunch. “We never thought of it as a replacement for humans. I know it’s like a scenario, people have said these things. That was never our view.”

In this wild year 2026 when every day Another tech executive announces layoffs In the name of replacing workers with artificial intelligence, Wu says he doesn’t particularly want programmers to lose their jobs. “We are all our own programmers,” he explained. “I started programming when I was nine years old.”

In fact, Wu has been described as one of the most accomplished competitive children’s programmers of all time, according to A recent profile on Colossus. As a second grader, Wu won a national mathematics competition for seventh graders, which launched a childhood filled with math and programming competitions. It also introduced him to several other innovators who have launched other AI technology startups, such as Scale AI founder Alexander Wang.

So, as he told TechCrunch, the idea was never to make human programmers obsolete.

“When we started building Devin, it was kind of funny,” he mused, “but we thought of it as: This is your friend helping you build more.” In fact, he showed a small stuffed animal holding a computer, much like his Devin teddy bear, which he keeps on his desk. He thinks it’s a physical code for Devin AI programmer “This is my friend who helps you build more.”

Wu doesn’t want AI agents to take away the joy of programming from people.

“It’s no secret, most software engineers love building software, right?” He said. “If you ask them why, basically what they’ll tell you is: ‘Well, it’s like I’ve been able to build things out of nothing. I can take my entire 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, it views agents as another layer of abstraction between envisioning and producing a software product.

However, Cognition says Devin’s role at its own company is to ship almost all software. The company says that 89% of the code implemented by its engineers was implemented by Devin, and the rest by local agents at Windsurf, a competing AI programming company. I acquired it last year.

Wu explains that his agent’s role is largely to do the kinds of lengthy maintenance tasks that many programmers don’t like to do anyway: updating outdated software; Transfer applications from one platform to another. Agents free programmers “from a lot of the hard work, so they can do more on the creative side,” he promised.

So Wu rejects the idea of ​​Devin “replacing” human programmers. While he says he can work independently, he works “somewhere between a junior engineer and a mid-level engineer” depending on the task at hand.

As for the concept of self-driving software, where the agent learns and improves itself so that one day it operates at higher levels (“Recursive” is the latest buzzword in AI these days“,” Wu says. “I think we’re in for a wild ride.”

He sees agents entering other fields where they will learn tasks, from customer service to medicine, but he hopes the goal is to increase human workers in those fields as well.

“Coding and software were the first to move in, but we’ll see it happen in all these other industries,” he predicts. “The one thing that was clear to us from the beginning was that it should always be up to the human… and that’s what you really see in software engineering, but I think that’s true in all these other professions as well.”