Cognition’s CEO on What Comes After Code

The future has a way of showing up early to some places. In software engineering, one of those places is Cognition (cognition.ai)—the startup that made headlines in early 2024 with Devin (every.to/chain-of-thought/coding-with-devin-my…), the world’s first autonomous coding agent, and more recently with its acquisition of the AI code editor Windsurf (cognition.ai/blog/windsurf).

Scott Wu (x.com/scottwu46?lang=en), Cognition’s cofounder and CEO, has a front-row seat to what comes next. In this episode of AI & I (every.to/podcast), we talk with Wu about why the fundamentals of computer science still matter in an AI-first world, the direction he sees for the short- and long-term future of programming, and why he believes we may already be living with AGI.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Start
00:02:02 – Introduction
00:02:32 – Why Scott thinks AGI is here
00:09:27 – Scott’s personal journey as a founder
00:16:55 – Why the fundamentals of computer science still matter
00:22:30 – How the future of programming will evolve
00:26:50 – A new workflow for the AI-first software engineer
00:29:33 – How Devin stacks up against Claude Code
00:40:05 – Reinforcement learning to build better coding agents
00:50:05 – What excites Scott about AI beyond Cognition

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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Scott Wu: Scott Wu (@ScottWu46) (x.com/scottwu46?lang=en)
• Learn more about Cognition: cognition.ai
Try the world’s first autonomous coding agent: devin.ai