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

“Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So, yeah. So Devin did finish working. It seems like there's something going on with the CI and it's debugging that right now. But it went ahead and put up the initial first pass pull request and we can take a look.”
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 so it's definitely like it's a hands on process. You certainly want to be involved when Devin is scoping out the task or giving you its thoughts. And the nice thing too, by the way, is Devon will give you its confidence level. And here's how likely I think I am to really understand this piece or that piece or whatever. But it helps make things a lot faster, right? And to your point, it's like a lot of product managers, for example, obviously love to be able to use Devon and Linea to understand things better, the code base better or things like that and Clairvo from, for example, from LaunchDarkly is a big Devon user and she loves basically going and scoping out tasks or asking data questions or asking, hey, what's going on? Or is this merged into production yet? Is this a feature flag right now or what percent of people are getting this or that feature? It's a clean way basically to make that intelligence much.”
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, one last flow I'll show. It's just, you know, we just rolled this out last week, actually, but it's a full kind of Devon automation setup with linear, right? And so, you know, if you have tasks that you're doing on the deep sequence repository, for example, and it's all set up, all you have to do is you just add the Devon label and Devon will come through and it'll give you this, right? And it's going to give you its thoughts on what the tasks looks like. And you can take a look at each of the particular files that you see or it'll point out snippets that it thinks are important. And from there, if you feel good about what was built or the conclusions that we came to, then you can just start off a DevON session that will go and actually do that work.”
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, yeah. Obviously, in the retrieval and kind of processing a lot of code and a lot of tokens at once is, you know, something that language models are really great at, right? And so basically being able to get those gains in the places that you need them is really great. Yeah. Sweet. All right.”
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, exactly. And one of the fun use cases that we've seen actually with folks is they'll often actually use Devon, get Devon's help to onboard new engineers on the team, right? And when you're new and you're joining, there's obviously a lot of questions that you have about the code base or about how things are set up. It also sometimes can be a little bit awkward to ask your mentor or your manager the questions if you're worried that they're going to be really dumb questions. And so it's nice to just be able to ask Devin and to go through Devon's wiki and to understand these internal representations, right?”
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 we go all the way to the biggest code base as possible, right? And one way I'd kind of put it is, you know, how the way that we as engineers would think about a large code base is certainly when you're making changes or when you're thinking about a particular task, you're not bringing in every single line of the code base at once, right? You have a high level abstraction that you're able to think about and look into, right? And then you're obviously able to zoom in and get to kind of higher resolution on each of these different things, right? And so Devon works in much the same way where the first thing it'll do is it's going to kind of figure out like the high level architecture of what's going on here and what this is built for and so on. But within each of the components, it's obviously also going to be able to zoom in and give some more detail about each of these. And so here's FP8 to be flood 16 and how exactly a lot of that is set up, right? Here's each of the different parts of the code base. And so similarly, it's...”
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 go through and it's able to kind of search through the entire code base and give you an informed answer based off of that. And so we use this a lot. And it helps when you're scoping out a task for Devin and doing an initial prompt. It also helps, obviously, just in a vacuum, like you often have questions about your code base that are really nice, right?”
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
“Building a representation of the code base and learning it and improving it over time is one of the big things that Devin does. And funnily enough, we found that naturally humans really are interested to understand this code-based representation as well. So Devon Wiki is something that we built here, and you can take a look at all these different pieces and see each of these different things. Here are the FP8 operations. Here's an SGLEG integration. There's diagrams of how the different layers are built and put together. deployment operations there's a lot of details about the architecture as well. And you can ask questions about it as well. And so for example, you can say how does DeepSeek handle multi-token prediction designed for SpecDec.”
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
“Over a million actually. And then one last one I'll show, and then maybe we can come back to our initial run after. But is, you know, like I was saying, like a lot of this is really built to work with all of the existing code workflows out there. And so, you know, for example, we were doing some exploration with the deep-seek repository on GitHub. And we imported it into Devon and we got our own fork of it set up in Devon and a couple things I just wanted to show here. One is Devon sets up its whole wiki with all of its internal understanding. And so when Devon indexes the code base, obviously.”
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
“Once a week, right And so, yeah, so we can go through all these and do all these. And I took this quiz, by the way, obviously, to make sure that I was well prepped. But yeah, this is kind of one of the more fun examples, obviously, of just like”
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
“Watch what it did, yep. Yeah, and so you know, especially when you're building engineering projects or something like that, you can see kind of like each of the steps that Devin was doing, or if Devon tested the code locally, obviously you want to be able to go and look and see what Devin was clicking around with and testing or things like that. So it found the newsletter, it's going and looking at this, right? And it's going and reading all of this. And then it says, okay, let's get started with putting the code together, right? And so it says, hey, I've researched, you know, it's going through and writing all of this, putting app together. It plays its own quiz itself, actually, which we should just play this quiz, actually. Let's see. Let's see how much I know. What is the name?”
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 we'll give Devin a chance to work, and it's going to go through these files, and it'll make a pull request for us, and we'll see and go from there. But I thought it'd be fun to show some other examples of Devon in action as well. One of the examples, actually this morning, which I just used Devin for, is I asked Devin to help me brush my own facts up for this podcast. And so obviously a huge fan of the podcast and the newsletter. I asked Devin, hey, Devon, I'm going to be on the podcast. Could you please research everything you can about him and make a nice website quiz for me so that I can make sure I know my facts, right? And so Devin, this was just this morning.”
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
“That's right. Yeah, one of the big pieces with Devin is Devin will always be enthusiastic. You know, we'll always be ready to put in the hours.”
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 we're going to kick this off. As you can see, Devin gets started instantly and goes ahead and respond. And again, you can work with this asynchronously. You can work with it synchronously as well for this. We'll just kind of go in a little bit and see exactly what's going on. But as you can see here, Devin's going through files and taking a look through a lot of stuff. And so we can follow here basically as we need to and see what makes sense. You can see Devin's already called out a few particular pieces where there's the sidebar, which we have implemented on the front end. And there's pieces there. And we're going to have a new component. And that component's going to link to Lenny's website. That all sounds good. Devin's asking us any questions if there's anything that we have here. Same story here where it's kind of you can let Devin make its own decisions and hand off, or you can go ahead and be kind of give some more thoughts, right? Should the button open in a new tab or within the application?”
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
“Engineering teams, PMs, and so on. What are the things that we would want to build that we would want to hand off? And so we have Devin set up with our own Devon code base, for example. And so I'll go ahead and kick off at Devon for that. And so I'll just say, hey, at Devin, I'm on with my friend, Lenny. Can you modify the Devon Web app? Let's feature your newsletter as part of the Devon.”
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 the whole process, obviously, of working with Devon is working asynchronously. And so I thought it'd be cool for us to actually just watch Devin a little bit in action and then we can go through some other examples of work that Devon's done or things that Devon does for us, even on our team, for example, but then we can check back asynchronously with our Devon after. And so I'll share this real quick. And the key thing that I would just emphasize here is a lot of it obviously is really just about. Yeah, thinking about as a software engineer or as engineers ourselves or engineering teams.”
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 we're going to shift more and more towards this agentic workflow because that's in some ways it's kind of like the way to really get to that 200% 500% a thousand percent gains that we'll be getting to with software engineering over the next few years”
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 the real world, you're just capped by real world constraints, right? And I think that one way to put it is kind of like, and don't take these numbers exactly, but it's kind of like the first order math of it is, of course, being able to write files or to complete this function or complete this line or things like that, it helps a ton. It's a really great experience, right? There's a lot of parts of building software that obviously are almost not that at all, right? You have a bug that you're trying to fix. And so you spin up the local server, you click around on your own product on the front end and try to reproduce the bug yourself once you have the error, you take a look at Datadog and you see what happened and you try to find other errors in the logs. You know, you look at those files and you see what went wrong, make some edits. Maybe you go and like rerun the whole process again now that you make sure your change looks right, right? And that's a lot of what it means to be a software engineer, right? And these are processes that take real 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
“Honestly, I think as a community, you know, I think the kind of all of us as engineers around the world, I think, are going to have to think about this and build for this and kind of adapt to these new technologies. But what I would say is, yeah, I think more and more, and especially as capabilities get better, but certainly even in steady state today, I think more and more, I think things are going to shift towards this kind of asynchronous flow. And one of the reasons I would say for 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
“Yeah, and for what it's worth, we've already seen this shift, I would say, ourselves, where in terms of the team, obviously, folks don't spend that much of their time just writing out boilerplate or just kind of doing pure implementation of features. And people get to spend much more of their time focused on really just thinking about the core questions of, yeah, how do we make Devon better? What is the right interface for Devon? What is the right flow or the right set of features that's really going to make this as great of an experience as possible? And that's how we like things.”
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
“Complex parts where you want to steer Devon towards particularly what kinds of changes you want to make. I want the class to be set up this way and I want we should go and change all the downstream references to this as well or whatever. But basically having Devon do the bulk of the work asynchronously with you.”
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
“Add to your company. Yeah, so it's very asynchronous. And so obviously, you can kick them up and start them up and shut them down basically as you see fit. But most folks on the team are definitely working with up to five diffens at once, I would say. And it's a nice flow where you think through, all right, what are the five things that we want to get done today? One, two, three, four, five. You have Devin 1 due number one. You have Devon 2 do number two, Devon three. And the thing about it is A lot of it is, and for what it's worth, I think it's taken us some time to really kind of adjust to it and get to the point where it's really intuitive for us. But I think it's, yeah, it's definitely a different experience where you're handing off most things asynchronously. And the goal for each of your tasks is to be there for the parts that really need your expertise, where either you really, really need to define exactly what it is that you're solving for and what you're building, or maybe some of the 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
“Absolutely, yeah. So Jevin's paradox just says that as the price of something goes down, it can still be the case that the total spend on it actually goes up. And so you can think about this with money. You can think about this with time or resources, but the direct version here is, I think, as it becomes easier and easier to program and as programming becomes more and more effective, I think we're going to have a lot more programmers. I think in a kind of zero-sum view, you might say, well, we're going to be 10 times faster at software engineering. And so it means that we're going to need 10 times fewer software engineers, right? But I think in practice, what really is going to happen is actually we're going to build even more than 10 times as much code. And because all of the work that we do is so capped, obviously, on our ability to actually build and execute and iterate, we're going to have so many great ideas out there. We're going to have so many great products out there. People are going to build a lot more personalized experiences, for example, and there's going to be a lot.”
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
“Factor of what it means to be a programmer obviously is going to change in some sense it already has but I think there's just going to be so much more for us to build. I think one of the great things folks talk about Jeffin's paradox all the time. I mean software is truly the kind of the shining example of Jeffen's paradox where we have always managed as a society to find more and more things that we want to build software for and build more code for. And I really think there's a lot more out there 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
“Sure. And I think architect, I mean, we already have a term for architect in engineering, and I think it is directly the right term. And I think a lot of it is really, it's, I think, one thing to kind of just do a routine implementation and write boiler prate code and things like that. And I would say that in many ways, AI coding has already made us much faster at that, right? But I think a lot of the core questions of understanding very complex systems and working in the context of the whole company and thinking about the product that you're building or the work that you're doing and understanding, okay, what are the problems that we want to solve? How do we want to solve those problems? What is exactly the solution that we want to build? What are all these key decisions and trade-offs that we're going to be making? Basically, I think folks who are able to do that really, really well are just going to be able to leverage themselves more and more. So if anything, I think there's going to be, I think there's going to be way more programmers and way more engineers a few years from now than there are today. And I think pretty quickly, the full.”
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
“Build some pretty cool stuff and to do some pretty amazing work just by explaining what it is that you want. But I think that for quite some time, you'll really want to be able to think precisely about the details, to peel back the abstractions, to be very, very, very precise about what it is that you want to build and how.”
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 lot of things are already abstracted away from you. And in some sense, someone from 50 years ago might already call Python, you just get to explain in English what you want and now the computer does it for you, right? And that's great. And I think it's really powerful. It's opened it up. I mean, we have far more programmers, obviously, than we ever have before because of that. But I would say certainly as you're building your skills as an engineer, it really helps a lot to understand the abstractions and to be able to peel the layers beneath, right? And so, you know, folks will use assembly, for example, if they're really performance optimizing a piece of code. But also, you know, in order to build good systems and to understand these things, you certainly want to understand these abstractions of how does networking work, what is TCP IP like exactly, or what happens with this Python code when it gets interpreted, or all of these details. And I think similarly, I think we will get to a state where, yeah, with no experience at all, you're going to be able 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
“Yeah, for sure. I love this question. And first of all, the question of whether you should still learn to code, my answer would be absolutely yes. I think to a large extent, computer science, when you take computer science classes and when you learn these fundamentals, sure, you're learning a little bit about how a particular language's syntax works or something like that. But honestly, most of what you're learning really is about the ability to logically break down problems for number one. And two, I would say, is just, yeah, the model of a computer and a lot of these decisions and a lot of the abstractions that we've built over time, right? Like what is a database and how should you think about a database? What is a garbage collection system and how do those work and all of these different pieces? And the reason I think that's important is because it's the same with a lot of these other, arguably we've already kind of gone through these phases in programming. And I think this next one is going to be somewhat faster and somewhat bigger. But in many ways, a similar flavor, which is when you work with Python today,”
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 in the neighborhood of 10% of the average software engineer's time, right? Because 90% of the time is, you know, you've got this Kubernetes error that you've got to debug and you have to see what went wrong and the system crashed or you left some port open and this is messing up or there's a bug report that you have to take care of or you've got to migrate your code or you've got to upgrade to a new version or things like that more kind of like implementation. And one of the ways that we've kind of thought about Devon in building Devon is really allowing engineers to go from brick later to architect, so to speak. And a lot of it is, yeah, just getting to the point where you can do the high level directing and you can basically specify things exactly how you want. I think it is very much about still having the human in control and having the human able to do the full specification, but just multiplying the magnitude of what you can do and what you can build in one day or one hour or however long.”
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 by the end of this year, we expect it to be more than half. And I mean, as time goes on, one of the things that we've seen is just you're able to do more and more and more work asynchronously, right? And you're able to hand off more and more. I think the soul of programming, the soul of software engineering has really been about through all the areas, not just now, but even when it was assembly, right? And even when it was Pascal and even when it was punch cards or whatever, I think the soul of it has really been basically just about defining the problem that you're facing and really thinking through exactly what is the solution that you want to build, you know, thinking through the architecture, thinking through the details, and really kind of mapping out in your mind exactly what you want to build basically and what you want to have your computer do. And I think that's what makes software engineering really great. And I think that's like the funnest part of software engineering. I think at the same time, that's probably.”
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, it's grown a ton. I mean, we've seen it growing exponentially internally ourselves as well. And so it's kind of an interesting one where, again, it's always both the capabilities and the product interface. And so I think the intelligence has increased a lot. But the other thing, of course, is we've spent a lot of time in figuring out how to build to really kind of build for an interface where you can get Devin's value on tasks.”
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
“Paradigms that you want to build, then it is naturally the case that there's a lot of handoff points where you just say, hey, at Devin, here's what's going on. Can you please take a pass at this, right? And sometimes Devon will be able to do the task 100% autonomously and just makes the PR and then you merge the PR and that's great. Sometimes you want to be able to jump in for the 10 or 20% that really needs your help. Maybe there's a few details with how exactly you want to scope it or how you're architecting this feature or maybe you want to go and test the front end at the end yourself to make sure it looks exactly the way that you want and give your one or two lines of feedback after that, right? But a lot of it is really as is kind of like, yeah, learning to learning to work with Devin to be able to just do more in parallel and build 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
“These things. But at the end of the day, of course, the discipline is all about just being able to tell your computer what's due. And so, in that lens, I really think that programming is, if anything, is only going to become more and more important as AI gets more powerful. And I think the thing that's really exciting for us is, yeah, it's really seeing that kind of iterative transformation. And so you asked what things look like today. And I would say, yeah, it really is having a junior buddy or really a team of junior buddies that you can work with, right? And so every engineer on our team, we use a ton of Devon when we're building Devon. And so Devon merges like several hundred pull requests into production in the Devon code bases every month, which is, I mean, our whole team is only like 15 engineers. And so it's a pretty sizable fraction of all the code that we write. And the way that we use it is basically, yeah, everyone's got their whole team of Devans. If you're going to be looking through various issues, if you're going through feature requests, if you're going through bugs, if you're going through new pairs.”
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
“By the way, we're all software engineers ourselves. It's like I'm a programmer by training and still a programmer at heart, certainly. And I think the way that we have always thought about it is there's layers of abstraction and there's tools. And one way I would say it at a high level is kind of, you know, I think of AI in general as, yeah, I mean, computers are obviously getting more and more intelligent and are able to do more and more. It's possible there may come a day where computers truly do everything that we do and humans are not responsible for any of it. You know, I don't expect that to come particularly soon. But I guess what I would say is, you know, until that point, for as long as we're still part of the equation, one of the most important things to do, obviously, is for us as humans is to instruct our computers on what we want and what we want to build and what we want to do, right? And software engineering is, you know, we think of it today, obviously, as Python and C++ and JavaScript.”
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
“Or CI or things like that. Obviously, we want to make sure Devin's got its own virtual machine set up to be able to do that. And similarly, I think the usage pattern, I think often it wasn't clear. And obviously you can sit and just kind of watch Devon do it action by action and work that way. But we found that the best workflow really as a team building a lot of stuff was to work with multiple Devons and to run them asynchronously and to kick them off and to only jump in basically as you needed to provide feedback or steer the plan or anything like that. And so in many ways, I think Devin, as a name really is our attempt to kind of capture the soul of that as a product where it really is treating it like a bit more of an autonomous entity that you can hand off tasks that you can work with, that you should be teaching and learning with 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
“I would say it's a decision we're pretty proud of, I would say. I mean, I think there's a lot of different product experiences out there. And I think the thing that really makes Devon unique in what it does is that you can really hand off. And more and more what we've seen, honestly, is that I think a lot of kind of explaining that the Devon experience to folks is really just explaining to us as, yeah, this is your junior buddy. And that goes for a lot of the parts of the flow where in the onboarding, for example, initially, I would say like we've definitely had a lot of users come in and just kind of see the blank screen and not really know or they'd ask, hey, like I'm going to do this whole big re-architecture, the whole code base. And basically, what we've learned over time is to basically get folks to think more like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, let's work on getting the repository set up first. Let's make sure we hand Devon a couple one-pointer tasks so it can get familiar with the code base. You know, let's get at the thing if Devin needs to be able to test the code or run the lint.”
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, so we started in November of 2023, which was just like hackathon mode. We officially made it into a company around the start of 2024. And then our initial launch was in March. And so it was like non-stop. I mean, it's been non-stop for the entire last, you know, 17 months, but it's getting to the launch. And then obviously working with enterprises and developing the product a lot more, building it and getting it to work for a lot of practical use cases and then making it fully available self-serve in December of last year. And now we've rolled out 2.0, obviously just a few weeks ago. And so it's been a very busy time 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
“The idea of talking to Devin, for example, was like, you know, it was something that we had to come up with, right? Initially, it was just like you hand off a task and then it works, and then it shows you this whole finished code, right? And now obviously it's like you can jump in at any time. You can give feedback on the plan. You guys can scope out the task together when you're working with Devon. And a lot of these things, we had to develop, obviously. And certainly we've learned a lot about the use cases, the form factor. We've made a lot of big improvements and step function improvements on the capabilities and Devon's ability to use tools and debug and make decisions. And so it's, yeah, it's been a fun journey. I mean, I think I would say that the grounding question for us really is, which is one that we think about all the time, is really just like, what is the future of software engineering? And how should we be working with AI to write code? Because I think at the end of the day, of course, that's what underlies all of the product decisions that we make.”
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 mean, OpenAI and ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Claude, and Google. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So, you know, when we got started, it wasn't even really a company. I mean, it's more like a project or a hackathon almost. We got a bunch of, we booked an Airbnb basically for a couple weeks. This was around Thanksgiving time and just got a bunch of people together who were just excited to hack on some projects and build something cool. And it's funny actually the first thing that we were building for actually was more like solving like these more like contest programming problems and using like an agentic loop to really do better on that. And so obviously if you run your code on test cases, you can evaluate there's a lot of agentic work that you can do there to try and do better. And that we spent some time on that initially. And then we've kind of gone from, I mean, the story of the whole company for us in some sense has been going from hacker house to hacker house, you know. So after that, you know, we had another hacker house. And that's 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
“Been a lot of great experiences in text completion. It's been used for marketing. It's been used for customer support. It's been used for education. And in CODA, obviously, as well as the GitHub co-pilot was kind of really the dominant product of that initial wave, right? But I think the big shift that we really felt we would see is moving from kind of this text-to-text model to an actual autonomous system that can make decisions, that can interact with the real world, that can take in feedback, that can iterate and take multiple steps to solve problems. And now we call that agents. But that was what we were really excited about at the time. So it was always coding. It was always agents. And in some ways, that kind of feels like it should have been, you know, like been clear from the start. But even with that, I feel like we've pivoted like eight times or something within coding agents over 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
“Paradigm, which we've gotten into over this last year or year and a half is really high compute RL, which is a very different paradigm, right? Which is basically the ability to go and do work on tasks and put something together and then be evaluated on whether that was correct or incorrect and use that knowledge to decide what to do and to learn from that, right? And so, you know, we felt very strongly that that was going to happen. I think for us is code was the natural thing to work on for a couple reasons. One, because we're all programmer nerds ourselves. And so teaching AI to code is about as cool as it gets for us, but also because code has this whole automated feedback loop, right? Where you can run the code. And that is the kind of automated feedback that really feeds into the RL, which makes these models so great at coding. And then the other thing that we felt very strongly about was that the product experience was going to shift from what I'll call like text completion to agents, basically, right? And to first order, I would kind of say, you know, there are.”
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
“Tools start up for machine learning. And we were really excited to build something together. And this was around late 2023. So about a year and a half ago at this point. And yeah, when we got started, I mean, I think there were a couple of things that we felt really strongly about. And one was that reinforcement learning was really working and was going to be the next big paradigm shift in capabilities. Back then, it was the initial ChatGPT launch in 2022 and those models were to first order were what we would call imitation learning in AI, right? Which is basically you have the model read all the text that you can find on the internet and then train it to talk like somebody on the internet would talk, right? And they're kind of obviously a lot more details on top of that, but that's kind of the first order pass of what was really done. And it was amazing, right? I mean, a passed a turning test. It was able to respond and to have encyclopedic knowledge about a lot of things. And I think this new.”
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
“The founding team, I mean, most of us have known each other for years and years and years actually, and for almost everyone, this is our first time working together, but we've known each other a long time. And we all actually had our own kind of journeys in AI for the last decade or so. And so for myself, I ran a company called before this called Lunch Club, which was an AI for a professional networking product. And I ran that for about five years. And my co-founder, one of my co-founders, Stephen, was one of the first engineers at a company called Scale AI, which has obviously grown a lot and done very well. My other co-founder, Walden, was an early engineer at a company called Cursor, which is also obviously grown a lot and done really well. And our whole team kind of was kind of like that. Many of us knew each other from competitive programming and math competitions, but we had stayed very closely in touch in the decade since then. And we've all kind of all had our own journeys. And so, you know, we had one person who was running teams that Neuro, we had one person who was at Waymo, someone who had their own YC.”
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 we work with companies of all stages and sizes on the smallest end. It goes to startups of just one or two people who are using Devon to build out a lot of their kind of like initial prototyped or initial product all the way up to big public companies, Fortune 100 companies or public banks or things like that who are using DevON across their engineering teams. In general, we've seen a huge range of the use cases there. And obviously the kinds of engineering work that you're doing at a one or two person startups are very different from the kind of work that you're doing at a public bank. But throughout, it's all been basically being that junior buddy of yours that makes you go faster and really multiplies you, I would say. I think there's, it can multiply you as an engineer, obviously, by just like letting you work with your own team of Devons instead of having to be kind of like fully synchronous on a single task. And then it's also kind of like multiplying your team and multiplying your team's knowledge base because Devin really accumulates a lot of the knowledge.”
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 it's a 50 50 of both. I think the capabilities obviously have improved a ton. And we've seen these get better and get measurably better. But I think the other side of it is everything to do with really the product interface and the tools and so on. And I think today folks generally know how to use chatbots and to work with chatbots, right? And that's an interface that people are familiar with. And obviously with agents, it's still like a real curve, I think, to learn how to use them and how to get the most out of them. And so it's really exciting to see a lot of others starting to build and do a lot more in the agent space as well. But I think this is the kind of thing that we're all really figuring out together as a space.”
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, and it's crazy to think about, by the way, because a year ago when we did the initial launch, I mean, people didn't really believe that an agent was possible. And it was a very, I mean, it was a very different time. Things with model capabilities were definitely quite a bit earlier on. Reasoning especially was quite a bit earlier on. And yeah, I mean, in time since then, it's obviously developed a lot. I think in terms of practical skills, you know, there's some comparisons we make. Sometimes we kind of say, well, when we got started, it was kind of like a high school CS student. And then as time went on, it became more of like a college intern. And now it's like a junior engineer. But I would say, though, that those are more like rough guidelines because I really like the phrase jagged intelligence, for example, because there are obviously there are certain things that it is much better at than a human. There are certain things that it's much worse at than a human. And I think over the last year, we've learned a lot, especially about not just coding 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
“Absolutely. And so Devin is a fully autonomous software engineer that is going to work on tasks end to end. And so there are a lot of great tools for all parts of the stack of the AI code workflow. What Devin does is it is a full asynchronous workflow. And so you can tag Devon on an issue in Slack. You're talking about an issue and you tag Devon. You can tag Devon in Linear. You can have Devon. And Devon will make pull requests in your GitHub. And so it's very much built to work with engineering teams as your junior engineer.”
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
“Exactly. We believe product teams should focus engineering efforts on competitive advantages, not integrations. That's why companies like U.C.Com, AI21, and hundreds of others use Paragon to accelerate their integration strategy.”
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
“Well, these integrations are a pain to build, and that's why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of months across every use case, from rag data ingestion to a gentic actions.”
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
“Are mission critical for AI for two reasons. First, AI products need context from the customer's business data, such as Google Drive Files, Slack messages, or CRM records. Second, for AI products to automate work on behalf of users, AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third-party tools.”
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