Scott Wu - Building Cognition - [Invest Like the Best, EP.402]
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What is Cognition and how does Devin work as the first AI software engineer?
I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset management firms. And seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount, and more risk. Ridgeline offers a better way forward, one unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance, and more, all at scale. Ridgeline is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster. Faster, operate smarter, and stay ahead of the curve. See what Ridgeline can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is InvestLike the Best.
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My guest today is Scott Wu. Scott is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, which is an applied AI lab that has created the first AI software engineer, which they call Devon. In just a year since founding Cognition, Devon functions at the level of a junior software engineer, capable of handling complete engineering workflows from bug fixing to submitting pull requests. Scott is a former competitive programming champion, and he describes the engineering field as simply the art of telling a computer what you want it to do. Scott predicts AI will surpass the world's best competitive programmer within one to two years, and sees this technology not as replacing programmers, but as democratizing software creation.
We discuss the bottleneck in software development, the future of AI in various industries, and the challenges of leveling up Devon. The implication of Scott's work and Devon itself is enormous. Please enjoy my great conversation with Scott Wood. Scott, since not everyone listening will know cognition intimately, can you just start by describing what the business is and does? It's quite young. It's made a lot of progress very, very quickly, which is gonna be a topic of our conversation in general. But maybe just start by describing for those listening what cognition does.
Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me. We got started actually just around one year ago, and we are focused on building AI to automate software engineering. The product we're building is called Devin, and Devin is the first fully autonomous software engineer. And what that means is that Devin is basically able to do all of the parts of the software flow. And so you work with Devin the same way that you would work with the coworker. And Devin Is in your Slack, Devin is in your GitHub, uses all of your tools and works in your local developer environment. And so you can just tag Devin. You can say, hey, at Devin, I've got this bug that's going on in the front end. Can you figure out what's going on?
Devin will do not just the parts of writing the code, but actually all of the parts around it as well, which includes getting the local environment running, reproducing the bug itself, taking a look at the logs, figuring out what's going on, testing the bug, adding in some unit tests, and then making making a pull request for you as the engineer to go review.
What's the right way to think about if I think about Devin as an actual engineer, its level of sophistication, maybe you could put it in like salary terms or something, or years of experience terms, or some other thing, like help manage my expectations for how much I could have this thing do without any human involved.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Cognition and how does Devin work as the first AI software engineer?
0:00–11:08
2
How does Devin differ from traditional IDE assistants and what tasks can it automate?
11:08–21:05
3
What are Devin’s current capabilities and limitations as a junior‑level engineer?
21:05–31:11
4
How can teams integrate Devin into their workflow using Slack, GitHub, and other tools?
31:11–41:55
5
What future advancements does Scott predict for AI in software engineering?
41:55–51:01
6
How will pricing and usage models evolve for AI agents like Devin?
51:01–59:40
7
What are the biggest challenges and competitive dynamics in AI‑driven software development?
59:40–1:08:42
8
How does the card‑trick demonstration illustrate AI’s creative potential and human collaboration?
1:08:42–1:11:56
Speakers
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