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—the startup that made headlines in early 2024 with Devin, the world’s first autonomous coding agent, and more recently with its acquisition of the AI code editor Windsurf.

Scott Wu, Cognition’s cofounder and CEO, has a front-row seat to what comes next. In this episode of AI & I, 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) 

• Learn more about Cognition: https://cognition.ai/ 

Try the world’s first autonomous coding agent: https://devin.ai/