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

Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week when his two-year-old AI coding agent startup raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. Cognition is the maker of Devin, one of the first and, arguably, most successful AI coding agents. Devin, the CEO says, “naturally owns tasks end to end.”

In fact, in the blog post announcing that raise, Cognition laid out a vision where “we are shifting to a world of self-driving software development.”

So, could Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 programmer? Yes, and no, Wu told JS. “We’ve never thought about it as replacing humans. I know it’s like a scenario, folks have said these things. It has never been our view.”

In this wild year of 2026 when every day another tech CEO announces layoffs in the name of supplanting workers with AI, Wu says he especially doesn’t want coders to lose their jobs. “We are all programmers ourselves,” he explained. “I started coding when I was nine.”

In fact, Wu has been called one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers of all time, according to a recent profile in Colossus. As a second-grader, Wu won a nationwide math competition for seventh-graders, which launched a childhood filled with math and programming tournaments. It also introduced him to other wunderkinds who went on to launch other AI tech startups, like Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.

So, he tells JS, the idea was never to make human programmers obsolete.

“When we started building Devin, it’s kind of a funny thing,” he mused, “but we really just thought of it as: this is your buddy who helps you build more.” In fact, he showed off a little stuffed animal holding a computer, his own Devin teddy bear of sorts, that he keeps on his desk. He thinks of it as a physical symbol of the Devin AI coder “This is my buddy that helps you build more.”

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

“It’s not a secret, most software engineers love building software, right?” he said. “If you ask them why, what they’ll basically tell you is, ‘Well, it’s like I get to build things from nothing. I can make my whole idea that I have, and turn it into a product. I can turn it into an experience.’”

Just like visual development environments abstracted software creation away from machine instructions, he views agents as another layer of abstraction between envisioning a software product and producing it.

Yet, Cognition says that Devin’s role in its own company is to ship nearly all the software. The company says that 89% of code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin, and the rest by local agents in Windsurf, the AI coding competitor it acquired last year.

Wu explains that his agent’s role is largely to do the kinds of long-tail maintenance tasks that many programmers don’t like to do anyway: bringing old software up to date; moving applications off one platform and onto another. Agents will free programmers “from a lot of the toil, and so they can do much more of the creation side,” he promises.

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

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

He sees agents entering other fields where they will learn tasks, from customer service to medicine, but hopes the goal will be to augment human workers in those areas, too.

“Code and software has been the first to move, but we’ll see this happen in all these other industries,” he predicts. “One thing that’s been clear to us since the beginning is, it should always be up to the human what to do … you really see this in software engineering, but I think it’s true in all these other professions too.”