YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Wu

lines on the record: 103
first: 2025-05-04
most recent: 2025-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Awesome. Yeah, no, we're at app.div.ai. And you can find us as well on Twitter or a lot of other social media. We'd obviously love to hear any feedback you have about the Devon product. There's so much to figure out. And I think the Like I said, I think we're all still like 20 steps away from really the future of software engineering. And so it really means a lot to hear what folks think about the product as they're trying it out. And so please let us know anytime if there's things that we can do to make better.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so Devian's a dev. And so it was kind of like when we were consolidating all the names, it just kind of seemed clear then that this would be the universal dev that we all like to work with.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Devin was the name from pretty early on. We were interested. We were working on coding agents from the beginning and my co-founders are Steven and Walden, for example, and we had this idea. All right, let's get started and let's not let's try to kind of like kind of like expand the box as much as we can so have everyone kind of think out of the box and do their own thing. And let's have everyone do their own thing first for a bit and then we'll kind of like consolidate and take everything that we've learned. And so Walden made a virtual developer version of him, which was called Dev Walden. And then Steven made one of him, which is called Dev Steven. And we had all these. And then we were kind of combining it all into one thing. And we're like, okay, you know, it's Devin. And that was the thing. And so Devin was like, yeah, Devin stuck for us quite early on.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With both wins and losses, right? And you want to be able to move on and go on to the next one each time. And something, yeah, I mean, it's funny, but what I've found personally is that obviously it's really important for your own emotional state and mental state to be able to do that. And we've had lots of mistakes. And, you know, I've had a lot of, you know, I had my first company, which is obviously, which was cool, but, you know, there were a lot of like tricky spots there. And then over the course of cognition, I mean, it's been, feels like it's been already like eight years compressed since like one year. And it's still going at that pace. But it's somehow it also actually makes you more successful, I think, too. You know, it's like you are just more able to give it your best and to do the things that will lead to success if you're not tying it up in your own personal worth.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is very important to be focused and driven and to really kind of maximize your potential. And then at the same time, it's also very important to not let your own personal emotion get tied up in your success or failure. And I think especially with startups, because there's always ups and downs, honestly, even in the most successful companies ever, it is just like, you know, it's a rocky road. There's a lot that happens and a lot that goes down. And I think one of the things which I've thought a lot about is that somehow it's, you know, you really want to do your best and put everything you can into it and do everything you can to basically, you want to put it all out on the field. But at the same time, you want to be okay with”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, something I've thought about a lot is Lot of the proverbs out there are actually contradictions, right? It's like birds of a feather and then you also have opposites attract, right? And it's kind of funny because you feel that both of them are true. And often they both are true. And a lot of it is about understanding why. And one of those that I feel like, especially in the world of startups that I think about like all the time. I think”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can imagine not that long from now, we'll have the aura frame accepted studio giblifies every photo that you have in it, and then it's, yeah.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One I would say is, you know, I got an aura frame recently. It's just like a frame that shows photos. And you can show a new photo every day or every hour or every 15 minutes or whatever you like. I've really enjoyed it a lot. I think it's a nice way to just have basically just have picture framework memories that come up. And then the other thing I would say as like a general purpose thing, you know, it's not particularly new, but I would say I think AirPods are extremely well built and well designed. I realize now that it's like I basically use them for all sorts of, you know, I'm taking calls on a walk and I'm using airplies. I'm obviously doing work at my computer at my desk. I'm plugged into AirPods and it works quite well, honestly, for a lot of different situations. And they're very comfortable. They're very consistent.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to admit, I have not watched, I can't think of a single movie or TV show that I have watched in the last while. So I'm sure there's looking forward to watching a lot of great ones post-AGI.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of nonfiction, I think for folks in startups, I think one of the things that I've really enjoyed is just learning and understanding the history of Silicon Valley. And there's such, you know, all of these things that we think about. Somebody invented them. I mean, it's one of the great realizations, I feel like, is like, you know, somebody invented the idea of a seed route, right? Somebody invented the idea of venture capital. Somebody invented the idea of product market fit and all of these different principles that we talk about. And so for that, there's a book called the power law by Sebastian Malabe, which I really like. It basically is just kind of like, yeah, a tour of many of the great businesses and the great products that have been built over the last 60, 70 years in Silicon Valley, which I really love. I think in terms of fiction, I actually have always, really liked the great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's one of my personal favorites as a fiction book.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest thing that comes to mind for me is there's a lot of different perceptions about AI, right? There's, I think every basically, every emotion under the sun right now, there's a lot of fear. I think the main thing that comes to mind for me is I'm honestly really optimistic about what we're building here with AI and not just with code and with Devin, but the whole space and everything that's getting done. And I think one of the cool things that is really actively happening is just the ability for everyone to multiply themselves. And that's how we've always thought about it. It's how we've thought about what we're building. And it's, you know, I think there is a lot more to do out there in the world. I'm not too worried about us running out of things to do. And from that lens, I think that the thing that we've always been most excited about is”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, build something people want, you know, stay as close as possible to your customers, right? And then I think the other thing is just always think about where things are going, not where they are today. I feel like those are kind of like the five things, which is, you know, especially in AI with things moving so fast and there's so much great talent. You know, I feel like a lot of these are even more true where it's kind of like it's not just thinking about where things are going to be in 10 years. It's like thinking about what's going to happen next week. And it's obviously things are moving very quickly and it is very hard to predict, but you really have to be very, very rigorous with yourself, I'd say, about thinking through those things and evaluating all of the decisions that you make in that lens.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, and I was just saying, it's just like, you know, a lot of things, yeah, we've fought very hard to just kind of like, yeah, like reimagine things from the ground up because it's, you know, a lot of it really is just thinking about like, yeah, like where, where do we think the technology is going over the next five to ten years? And what is the place that we want to have in the future?”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the experience you needed to start his own company. But the other thing that one of the other things that was big is like he really, he was talking with a lot of great companies already. He didn't want to burn any bridges. And so we actually worked with him. And basically handwrote all of his rejection responses to each of the other companies and kind of worked with him on it to say like, you know, here's how you should say it in a way that's going to come off as that you really did appreciate the time with them and that you obviously you want to remain close with them and stay in touch and and it was the kind of thing obviously where it's it's like look obviously it's our job is to make sure that he's happy enough that that he doesn't want to leave anytime in the near future but i i think it's the kind of thing where you know the the way that you put together a really really great team is by it is by really what's what's by fighting for for what's right for them too so”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where everyone was happy with that and then went straight back to the airport and flew right back, basically. And that was the first and only time that I've ever been in North Carolina. It was just a great trip. And it's the kind of thing where it's like, you know, hiring great people is one thing, but truly just never giving up and really giving it everything that you can to make it work for people who really make sense to be on the team. And he's been with us on the team for over a year now and he's been an incredible, incredible engineer and we wouldn't be here without him. And similarly, we had someone else who is, again, really, really talented candidate, you know, did amazingly well, very young and had a lot of great offers at a lot of other companies. And we were talking to them about, you know, he wanted to start his own company someday as well. And we were talking to him about certainly, you know, a lot of the obvious things which are kind of like having him meet our investors or work with, you know, get to do work with customers or see a lot of these other components so that when the time came that he would have.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My parents really want me to graduate from school, and I'm just not sure there's a way to make it work. And so we talked him more and kind of just understood the situation. We flew to North Carolina, went straight from the airport to his parents' house, had dinner with him and his parents. We talked a lot, really, really nice Gujarati family. We kind of gave them some gifts and just talked to them about it and tried to understand, right? Like, what would it take and what would we need to make work? And they just said, you know, it sounds like a great opportunity, but we really want our son to be able to graduate, right? And we talked that through and we figured out a setup basically where he could work for us essentially full-time, but then come in for his required classes and do what he needed to do to get the diploma, basically, but no more than that. And we talked that through. And then, you know, we got to a point where.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To all ends, basically, you know, to get the folks that you really want to bring in. And one of my favorite stories to share is we had a candidate who came and interviewed. He was a junior at MIT. So he was very, very young. And we gave him our interview. And he did way better than almost any of the full-time candidates that we had ever talked to. And so we said, hey, what do you think about taking some time off of school and working with us and building out Devon? Like, we really think you're just going to be able to come in and just have a ton of impact already from day one. And he thought about it for a while. He came back. He said, you know what, I'm down. I want to do it.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Including team building and product and strategy and engineering decision making and fundraising and sales and every other component, right? But I also realize that as time has gone on more and more, I felt like building companies well sometimes just comes down to doing those three to five things, just even more than you could possibly expect. And so with us, it's like, you know, everyone says to go fast, you know, but it's like, yeah, we had a hackathon in November. We had another hackathon in December. We started the company officially in January. We got the prototypes out to initial users in February. We did a launch in March. We got our first customers in April. It's just like basically like truly pushing the pace in every spot where we possibly could has really made a difference for us. And similarly, it's like, yeah, everyone always says, you know, you should hire great people. But I think the truth within that truth is basically like you should fight.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I've thought about a lot lately as we've built this is not my first company. Actually, for a lot of us, it's not our first company. Actually, your point about cliches, I think, really spoke to me as well, which is kind of the really common things which you hear all the time in startups where it's like, you know, you got to move fast or you got to hire great people. It's like, okay, well, obviously you do. I wasn't planning on not hiring great people. I wasn't planning on going slow. And similarly, it's like, yeah, you really got to build something that people want, right? And there's kind of these like three to five things which are always repeated and they're always the common wisdom in startups. And I definitely had this idea as a founder when I was starting initially that, all right, so those are the kind of the three to five basic things. But as you get really deep into it, you spend a lot of years into it. You learn all of the thousands of other things you have to learn to be, you know, to build a company, right? And I think to some extent, that's, of course, true. And there's lots of little details that you'll get into with all these different things, right? Including.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think that this is very early, and I think we'll see this, but folks obviously love to talk about basically like systems and agents communicating with one another. And I think that there will be a lot of new paradigms to build for once we get there.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I think the thing that's kind of interesting too is with humans, the way I almost say it in technical terms is like there's this coupling of a context and a thread. And what I mean by that is like basically each human can only operate single-threaded on the work that they do and they have their set of context and then there's other humans obviously who can do other stuff at the same time, but they have their own context, right? With agents, one of the cool things is you can have an agent that's doing multiple lines of exploration at once, but is sharing all of the context of everything that they find.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So for what it's worth, Devin can start other Devons through the API, right? And so we've seen this happen quite a bit of times where naturally if you have some big task that you want to do, like Devon will do this all the time. It'll chunk up and then I'm paralyzed into smaller Devons. And so it's the kind of thing that you need to give Dev and the credentials to be able to do that. It's not currently something that is kind of like default enabled. But I could certainly imagine as time goes on that there's more and more of that.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up, you can obviously give that feedback, for example. But a lot of it is like it's more about basically like making Devin part of your flow than it is losing control, which I think is the main thing that folks are scared of with management.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like having an interface to hand off tasks and build tasks, right? And so the parallel that I would kind of draw is when we invented Python, obviously in many ways, the description and the outlining of tasks, obviously it was like a different paradigm, but I think certainly it was nowhere near what folks typically think of as kind of like management bureaucracy today, right? And I think that with Devin, a lot of it is just kind of like it's more like finding the right levels of abstraction that you could work with Devin on and just kind of like finding the workflows that work really well and the obvious thing to say here is it's a very you can always have Devon take a first pass at things, right? And so you can take the first path, you have Devon take the first pass if it's great, you merge it right away. If it's, you know, if it needs some time.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny actually because this is something that, you know, in terms of the wording that we've thought a lot about as well, it's just, you know, we've used the term like manager of Jeppins in the past, which of course I think is a big part of it. But I think that the only thing I would point out here is I do think that the bricklayer versus architect is closer to the experience than being a manager because I think a lot of the difficulty of management or the reason that people shy away from it is more because of the kind of various, let's say like there's kind of like all of the kind of like the context and the ownership and kind of like the responsibility and stuff. And then there's also kind of all of the emotional aspects of it, right? Where I think working with Devin is a little more like just being kind of like having”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I can just imagine the performance. Devin, you've done a really great job on your task, but I really would like you to be more proactive in the team meetings. So what I'd say.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest thing I would say is It really is just, you know, treat Devin like you're a new junior engineer. And I think that's the biggest thing. I think folks come in and they see the blank page and they think of all sorts of kind of like various things that they want to try out. They think of lots where I think typically the flow that we see that works best is obviously you can try demos and you can do things, but a lot of it is just like, yeah, let's figure out what tickets we want to get done today or to this week and let's have Dev get started on those. And let's start with the easier ones and then work with Devin and understand like what things Devon needs to get set up to be able to test its own code and do this well. And then let's scale up over time. And then obviously it's, you know, as you work with your engineer, you understand better kind of how to communicate with them or what are the right tasks or projects to bring them in on. But I think that's, yeah, that really is the one liner for us.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they'll see that, and then naturally they'll get on and they'll get an account. And one of the cool things, of course, is by the time they join, Devin already knows a good amount of detail about the repositories that they're already working in and they're working with that. And so one of the really cool things, which we often see is, yeah, that the early adopters themselves can really pave the way, I think, for everyone else on the team. But yeah, I think the main thing I would just kind of call out is, yeah, it really does take, it's a very different product experience, right? And I think it's for what it's worth, I think there's still a lot more that we should be, you know, that we can do to make it as intuitive and as clear as possible to folks like how to use Devin and what the right steps are and how to really maximize value out of Devon. But I think that, yeah, it's the kind of thing where you put in the investment and understand exactly what it takes to get Devon to be successful. We've found ourselves that as time has gone on, we just use Devon more and more and more.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a pattern which we often see with folks is there will be a few folks at the team who are really excited and want to try out the new thing and they want to put in the investment and are really excited to get it going. And they'll go through all the setup. They'll give Devin the repos. They'll teach Devin how to run the lint and the CI.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I mean, it's a fun time. And I think there will be real, real investment and real work that it takes. But I think from the perspective of us as engineers, for example, I think it just means it's so important to stay in the loop with everything that's happening. And as we're seeing, it's not only because of your learning and your ability to work these technologies, but it's also about basically like teaching the AI what there is to know about your code base in order to make it really effective at building with you and doing more of the things that you would want it to do.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we're firmly in that, you know, past the inflection point in AI could, right? Where it's as an engineer, if you're not using AI at all, right could. I mean, you're falling behind, honestly. And it is a technology that everyone should have and should be using. And there's no kind of like hardware distribution that is causing that. And it means that the space is just growing so exponentially, basically.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In these hardware distribution regimes, obviously there's a lot that depends on real time, right? And so folks who were building for those industries kind of saw their market grow and grow and grow basically steadily year over year as the number of people with mobile phones increased, right? As the number of people connected to the internet increased, right? And many of those businesses, it's still crazy to think, but many of those businesses got started right in the beginning. I mean, like Apple and Microsoft were started right around the same time. And the same is true for a lot of the great internet businesses or wherever. But certainly it was kind of like it was something that touched the whole world with time or a large fraction of the whole world. And it had a really massive impact, but it took place over several years, right? Because of the time that it took. And I think one of the things which is already, I'd say, different in AI is just how explosive the technology can be. Once AI could, you know, and I.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A number of reasons, I think AI is going to be the biggest technology shift of our lives. But I think one thing, which is what we were just talking about before this, which is most of the big tech revolutions that we've had over the last 50 years, I mean, I'm thinking about like personal computer and the Internet and the mobile phone and so they all had this big hardware component that was a big part of the distribution, right? And so you had the internet. And initially it was just these universities that were talking with one another. But obviously over time we got the whole world plugged into the internet and it took years and years and years. Same thing was true with mobile phones. Same thing was true with PC, right? And the thing that's interesting about that in particular, which is I would say we're already seeing the effects of that, is”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in terms of base intelligence, we're honestly basically already there. And I think a lot of what we see actually and what we spend our time on is less so, obviously, we don't pre-train our own models or things like that. It's less so like increasing the base IQ of a model, for example, and more about kind of like teaching it all of the idiosyncrasies of real world engineering, right? And thinking about, here's how you use Datadog and do this. And here's how you might diagnose this error and here are the different things that you could run into. And here's how you handle each of those. And when you're ready, here's how you make GitHub PR. And this is true in engineering. It's true in every other space as well. I mean, there's so much detail in idiosyncrasy to the work that we all do, obviously, day to day. And a lot of it is kind of like teaching the model to mirror the complexity of the real world, I would say, rather than kind of like getting it to.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We obviously, you know, we've been betting on agents for a long time. I think that agents were doable and workable a lot earlier than most folks might have thought. But certainly I think as the community has really rallied around it, I mean, you see the impacts of that in the pre-training, you see the impacts of that in a lot of the work that's done with these models. I actually don't think there's been any, like from our perspective, I don't think there's been any single like step function based model shift or anything that has been kind of like a night and day difference in Devon. But I certainly think that the curve of every point on the chart, I mean, there's a new model that comes out every like every week now has obviously made a big difference in terms of what we've been able to do. And then obviously on top of that, we work with the research teams at all these foundation labs to do a lot of our work on top. And so I think that my hot take here at which I would give is, I think.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think one of the things that's nice about our space too is software engineering, for better or worse, has a very clear tie to value. And what it means is one way to put it is there is always kind of like a clear next level, at least for the next while. I think there could be some point where you're just like, all right, just build the entirety of YouTube for me. And Devin just does the whole, it's like there's probably been like a hundred million hours of human engineering time built building YouTube, building the algorithm, building all the infrastructure, all the everything, every little detail. And like, you know, maybe there's some time where Devin just does that out of the box, you know, that's obviously going to be a long time from now. I think on the interim, on every level in between, obviously it's, you know, it makes a difference the quality of software engineering. And I think one of the cool things with developers, obviously, is developers are really willing to learn new experiences.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, when you do this change that you still support that workflow. And Devin will say, okay, sounds great, right? Or Devin will make a PR, I'll be working with Devin. We'll make pull requests in GitHub and somebody else will be reviewing that PR or give some comments, and Devin will work on that too, right? You'll be in linear. And so all these kind of spaces, it really does just kind of set up for an experience where basically where Devin can just grow in the value that it can provide for your whole work over time. And so I think from that perspective, if anything, we want there to be a lot of innovation and a lot of new products and so on. I don't think that the goal is to try to lock other people out of a building. There's a lot of stuff to build. I think there's going to be a lot of different experiences. I think from our perspective, what we think about is more like how can we make Devon more and more and more useful as you're using it more.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so similarly, it's like Devin will really learn and build its representation of your code base and of your stack and of your process over time. And we'll be able to do a lot more with that. And then the other piece of it, which I think is really exciting, I'd say, is there really is a lot to do of what I would kind of call like a multiplayer aspect of code, which if you think about it is how a lot of things get done in the real world, certainly, right? And so, you know, it's one thing to have your own experience, which you use yourself as just an engineer. But for example, ourselves, like we see this all the time where some engineers are working with Devon and teaching Devon things. And as I mentioned, like folks will have Devon onboard their new engineers and kind of convey that knowledge to them, right? Or similarly, it's like I'll start a session with Devin in Slack and I'll say, hey, it'd be cool if we could do this thing and some other engineer will chime in and say, oh, by the way, like the reason we did it initially was X and Y. And so Devin just makes.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I agree that at a high level, a lot of different folks had different layers of AI spectrum, the foundation labs or the application layer or so on. I don't think there's any kind of hard barrier that would prevent others from entering. I think what does exist is stickiness, which I would kind of define as, you know, once you have a product experience that you really like, are you excited to keep using that experience or is there kind of like, you know, is there an effect where it is just as easy from now on to just switch onto a new one and learn a new one and so on? And I think from that perspective, I think there's a few things that are really great about coding agents in particular. One, I would say is there is a lot of just inherent kind of stickiness and learning and buildup over time, which is that as you use Devin and as your whole team uses Devon, it's the same thing with an engineer, right? If you're joining on day one versus, you know, you've been at the company for five years. You wrote half the code yourself. You've touched every file. You've built every single piece, right? You know all the engineers.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd give one slight kind of tweak on that, which is I think it's often less about moats and more about stickiness. And what I mean by that is, you know, moats are in some sense, typically what folks mean by moat is something that means that a competitor couldn't even enter the market.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of real world software. There's a lot of COBOL out there still, there's a lot of Fortran out there still. There's lots of kind of abstractions and details that folks have done. And so I think from our perspective, we have been since the beginning have been laser focused on agentic coding. And that is the one thing that we've really believed in. It's one thing that we've designed for. And that goes all the way to even the revenue model with ACUs and having the usage-based setup. It goes into obviously all the product experiences of thinking how, okay, like where do you want to talk to Devin? You know, you want to be able to talk to Devin in Slack. You want to be able to spin this up from your issue tracker. You want to be able to all of these things. And then, of course, the capabilities. And so I think I don't think there's any one easy answer. I think it's obviously a combination of things. But this is really the space that we've lived in and spent all of our time in for the last year and a half.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With every addition of capabilities. Like, I kind of think of it as 20 generations of agent coding experiences to come. I think that one that we'll get to over the course of several years is probably something where you don't even look at the code at all, right? And you're actually just looking at your own product and you're just able to look and specify and say, hey, you know, this button should be a little bit rounder. Let's do that. And by the way, let's add a new tab here. And maybe we should save this information. Let's start up a database table and let's index it on X, Y, and Z columns. And you're just basically working with your product in real time and having your agent build out those things for you. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of generations in between here and there. But I think the product experience itself is going to change every single time. And then obviously there's all of the practicality of just getting it out there in the world. And so folks obviously need to learn how to use the new technology. There's a lot to do to deploy into all of the mess.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit easier, for example, right? There's great products out there for instant response, there's great products out there for logging, there's great products out there for billing. All of these different tools, right? And the obvious thing is what we're seeing with AI is all of these spaces are going to be moving multiple times faster, you know, and it's going to be like an order of magnitude shift, if anything, right? And so I think from our perspective, we've obviously had a very specific lens that we've bet on this whole time. And that is autonomous coding agents. And there's a lot of problems to solve there, to be honest, right? Like, there's still a ton to do on the core capabilities, certainly. And, you know, we see cases all the time where it's like, wow, why did Dev make that decision? That seems no human engineer would have ever done that. You know, there's all sorts of spots where, you know, with the product interface, there's obviously a lot to think about. And I think it's, by the way, not just like a single thing that we're working towards, but something that will change.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. And for what it's worth, I think all of these are incredible teams. I think really smart and really forward thinking folks who are building a lot of great products out there. And I think there's a lot to do, honestly, over the next few years with the advent of AGI or whatever you want to call it. I think one of the quotes that I love is in 2017, if you asked if we had AGI, the answer is no. And in 2025, if you asked if we have AGI, the answer is, well, you have to define AGI. And, you know, it depends on your think it does kind of get to the point of, I mean, there is a lot of really amazing stuff happening. I think that it's easy to underweight, I would say, just how big of a shift it is that we're seeing, right? I think there are a lot of great products out there, for example, over the last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years that have made each of these kind of like kind of these different niches of the life cycle of building a product.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it'll do the same thing, it'll go through and look through the files and give you an answer and stuff. But with that said, on the one hand, I think on the capability side, there's certainly a lot you can do to really optimize things for very specifically question answer about this repository. And that made sense to really kind of build into a specific kind of feature. And then on the other side, I would say we found that users actually really, really like having this access of control, right? Sometimes you have a task that you're thinking about, but you actually don't want Devon to get started on the task just yet. You want to ask Devon and understand what parts of the code base might be relevant, right? And so you want to be very direct about saying, like, this is just an ask. And I just want to see the snippets of code base that really, right? Or I just want to look at the wiki and understand the existing representation. And so it's kind of on both the capabilities and on the UX side, we've found that that's kind of what's naturally made sense over time.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is like a suite of tools. And as you can see here, we have Devin Search, we have Devon Wiki, we have the linear ticket scooping. And certainly these tools interact with each other. But I think as time has gone on, we've seen it more and more as really building this suite of tools. And I think that the core Asian experience and the core kind of agent that will go off and build each of these build things for you, for example, is always, of course, going to be Devin and that is the core piece, I think, that will always be what's really special about our work. But I think that all of the other features out there, there is a complex suite of work that's required for real world software sharing. And engineering is just messy at the end of the day, right? And so I think there are a lot of different flows and a lot of different use cases that make sense. And an obvious thing to point out is you could ask the same questions to Devin Search as you could to Devin, right? And Devin will go through.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're fully aware about the limitations and about where things get caught up. It's funny with AI, especially because I would say one of the, I would say the most common pieces of startup advice out there, I would say, is focus on a really niche cohort, do things that don't scale, make one use case that's really great, right? And then you grow from there. And I think that's, you know, I think that's great advice across the board. But yeah, it's kind of interesting because I think with generative AI, you naturally see this where a lot of product experiences can turn out to be more general. And so it's an interesting trade-off for us. This is something that we still always go back and forth on and how much do we want to do more to support all the other kind of use cases out there and to handle other things that folks might want to do with Devin. I think another one that comes to mind is how much Devin should be, let's say like a single comprehensive project experience.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give a couple that come to mind. One, I would say a question of I'll call it how opinionated we should be. You know, we had the workflows that we used to Devon for, which was very much, as you can see, for basically integrating to our Slack and GitHub, making pull requests for us in our repos, responding to issue reports or things like that. And naturally, we've had certainly a lot of other kind of different things that have come up that folks have tried. I mean, we have folks who order their DoorDash with Devin, for example, even. And we have folks who certainly, you know, a lot of people who are kind of building cool websites from scratch or working on things like that. And yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting trade-off for us where I think the way that I would describe it is, you know, in our product, certainly the large bulk of the features that we build are for this kind of like, you know, making pull requests and engineering teams use case. But I think basically our kind of general stance with all the others is obviously if folks want to use Devin for that, that's great. And we want to just kind of make sure that they're.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the way that we often describe it is I think Devin is best when it is working on tasks that are well defined. It's one way to put it is you want to be giving Devin tasks, not problems, right? And a lot of these things, you know, like what you just saw, which was kind of like a quick front end feature request or a bug fix or adding testing and documentation or things like that. One of the things that makes a loop really nice, obviously, is a quick way to iterate and test. And so with something like this, obviously super easy for us, for example, to just go pull up the preview and see that the link worked, right? Obviously would be easy for Devin to do as well. Devin will often go and log into Devin and start a Devon session and make sure when it's working on our own code base, which is kind of hilarious. But yeah, you generally want something that is kind of like easy to verify and easy to test is the main thing. And you can work on bigger projects or bigger asks as well, obviously, but in that case, you should certainly expect.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, Devin obviously has access to R. Devin CodeBase, it does a lot here, and so it's super familiar with all the pieces here. Beautiful. And it said, yeah. I like how that looks. We've got Devon Stoner.”
2025-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source