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)
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What is Devin and how does it work as an autonomous AI engineer?
Our whole team is only like fifteen engineers. We use a ton of Devon when we're building Devon. Most folks on the team are definitely working with up to five Devons at once. And so Devon merges like several hundred pull requests into production in the Devon code bases every month.
What percentage of your PRs are Devon versus humans right now?
It's in the neighborhood of a quarter or so.
Where do you think this will be at the end of the year?
Honestly, uh we expect it to be a decent bit more than half.
You guys are so ahead of how companies work with AI engineers.
AI is going to be the biggest technology shift of our lives. So most of the big tech revolutions that we've had over the last 50 years, like personal computer and the internet and the mobile phone, they all had this big hardware component that was a big part of the distribution. 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. One of the things which was already, I'd say Different in AI is just how explosive the technology can be. There's no weight on hardware distribution. It means that the space is just growing so exponentially.
How is the act of being an engineer and building changing? I
think there's gonna be way more programmers and way more engineers a few years from now. Pretty quickly the form factor of what it means to be a programmer obviously is gonna change. But at the end of the day, of course, the discipline is all about just being able to tell your computer what to do. And so in that lens, I really think that programming is only gonna become more and more important as AI gets more powerful.
Today, my guest is Scott Woo. Scott is the co founder and CEO of Cognition, which makes a product called Devon, the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. Unlike other AI tools that I've highlighted on this podcast, Devon is designed to act like an actual remote engineer that you chat with like you would with any other human engineer through Slack or through its dedicated website. When Devon launched about a year ago, it was very much a junior engineer. Over the past year, they've made a lot of Progress and Devon is now being used by tons of companies in production. We chat about how their engineering team of 15 uses Devons to build Devon, including how every engineer uses about five Devons each to help them code and move faster, how a quarter of their pull requests today are committed by Devons, and that they expect this to be over 50% by the end of the year.
We also talk about how Scott imagines software engineering is going to look in the future, and how the role of an engineer changes. From a coder to an architect. We also get into the eight pivots that they went through before landing on this path, why Scott believes AI tools like this will lead to more engineer hiring versus less. Also, where the name Devin comes from, and so much more. This episode is going to blow your mind. I highly recommend you listen to it if you're at all interested about where engineering, product building, and AI is going. A huge thank you to Claire Vaux for suggesting a Bunch of great questions for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of linear superhuman notion perplexity and granola. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Scott Woo. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions, from gong calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, Monday.com, and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best in class products faster.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Devin and how does it work as an autonomous AI engineer?
0:00–8:57
2
How did the founders come up with the idea and origin story of Devin?
8:57–18:59
3
How is Devin integrated into the engineering workflow (Slack, Linear, GitHub)?
18:59–26:38
4
What percentage of pull requests are currently generated by Devin and what are the growth targets?
26:38–35:51
5
How do engineers at Cognition use multiple Devins simultaneously?
35:51–44:59
6
What does the live demo show about Devin’s ability to write code and interact with tools?
44:59–1:00:52
7
Why do the founders believe AI will create more engineering jobs and shift engineers from brick‑layer to architect?
1:00:52–1:20:11
8
What are the long‑term moats and stickiness strategies for Devin’s product?
1:20:11–1:32:27
Speakers
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