Codebreakers

Backed by $200 million in funding, 28-year-old SCOTT WU and his team of competitive coders at Cognition are building an AI tool that can program entirely on its own, potentially disintegrating the whole industry. Is its $2 billion valuation the result of a true breakthrough, or just more AI hype?

- Rashi Shrivastava and Richard Nieva

Just before Christmas in 2023, the small team at Cognition was struggling to set up a particularly complex data server for the San Francisco-based AI startup's fledgling coding assistant, Devin. They'd spent hours poring over installation documents and trying different commands but just couldn't get it to work. Tired and frustrated, they decided to see how Devin would handle it.

As the AI sprung into action, it befuddled its creators. "It ran the most witchcraft, black-magic-looking commands," cofounder and head of product Walden Yan, 21, recalls. For a time, it seemed Devin wouldn't do any better than they had. Then a server terminal light that had been red for hours turned green. The data server was up and running.

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At one recruiting event, Cognition CEO Scott Wu challenged job applicants to see if they could square numbers faster than his Al. "Come talk to the Cognition team about a job if you can score higher than Devin," he said.

Devin had deleted a faulty system file the team had overlooked, they realized. "That was the moment it really hit me how much software engineering is going to change," Yan says.

It was the first major task Devin ever completed, and proof of concept for Cognition's vision of AI taking the grunt work out of coding. Now, almost a year later, Devin is handling basic engineering jobs-spotting and fixing bugs, updating chunks of code and migrating them between platforms. Give it a simple prompt "clean up this codebase"--and it creates a plan of action and executes it. Most times, it works.