Cognition’s Scott Wu says AI coding agents should not replace humans

Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week after his two-year-old AI coding agency startup raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. Cognition is the developer of Devin, one of the first and perhaps most successful AI coding agents. “Naturally, we own the task end-to-end,” says CEO Devin.

In fact, in the blog post announcing this increase, Cognition laid out its vision: “We are moving into the world of self-driving software development.”

So can Devin replace, say, an intermediate-level L4 programmer? Yes and no, Wu told TechCrunch. “We never thought about it replacing humans. I know that’s kind of the scenario, but people are saying things like that. That wasn’t our view.”

In this wild year of 2026, with tech company CEOs announcing layoffs every day in the name of replacing workers with AI, Wu says he especially doesn’t want programmers to lose their jobs. “We’re all programmers ourselves,” he explained. “I started coding when I was 9 years old.”

In fact, according to a recent profile on Colossus, Wu is said to be one of the greatest children’s competitive programmers of all time. In second grade, Wu won a national math competition for seventh graders and had a childhood filled with math and programming tournaments. It also introduced him to other geniuses who have launched other AI technology startups, like Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.

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

“When we started making Devin, we thought it was kind of funny,” he mused. In fact, he showed off a small stuffed animal with a computer on it, like a teddy bear of his own Devin, on his desk. He considers it a physical symbol of the Devin AI coder. “This is my buddy to help me build more.”

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

“It’s no secret, most software engineers love building software, right?” he said. “When you ask them why, they basically say, ‘Well, it’s like building something out of nothing. You can take all the ideas you have and turn them into products. You can turn them into experiences.’

In the same way that visual development environments abstracted software creation from machine instructions, he sees agents as another layer of abstraction between the conception of a software product and its production.

But Cognition says Devin’s role at the company is to ship almost all of its software. The company said Devin committed 89% of the code committed by its engineers, and the rest was committed by local agents at Windsurf, an AI coding competitor it acquired last year.

Wu explains that the main role of the agent is to perform the kinds of long-tail maintenance tasks that many programmers don’t like. Moving an application from one platform to another. Agents, he promises, will “relieve a lot of the effort from programmers and allow them to do more on the production side.”

So Wu is furious at the idea of ​​Devin “replacing” human programmers. He said it can operate independently, but that it operates “somewhere between a junior and mid-level engineer” depending on the task at hand.

As for the concept of self-driving software, Wu says the agent will learn and improve itself and one day function at a higher level (“recursive” is the latest buzzword in AI these days). “I think we’re in for a great adventure.”

He expects agents to move into other areas where they learn jobs from customer service to healthcare, but the goal is to augment the human workforce in those areas as well.

“Code and software moved first, but this will happen in all other industries as well,” he predicts. “One of the things that was clear to us from the beginning was that it should always be up to humans to do what they do. We see this a lot in software engineering, but I think it applies to all other professions as well.”