Cognition Labs: This AI startup will replace software engineers forever

This AI startup will replace software engineers forever.

They just raised a $21M series A led by Peter Thiel’s Founder Fund.

Last Month they unveiled “Devin”, the first ever fully functional AI software developer.

So what’s the company and how exactly does Devin work?

Cognition Labs was founded by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan in November 2023, but was only officially a corporation 3 months ago. The founders started Cognition as an applied AI lab focused on reasoning - to build the next AI software developer.

Cognition unveiled “Devin” on the 12th of March, the first fully functional AI software engineer. Devin has access to the same developer tooling we do like:

• A terminal/command line

• A browser

• A code editor

This way Devin can solve problems like a real software engineer.

A project manager can give Devin some requirements through plain english text, and Devin will respond by:

1. Creating a plan of action

2. Going to the web to fetch API documentation needed

3. Start writing the code

4. Run the code

5. Get an error and fixes the code

6. Repeat this in an infinite loop until the original problem is solved

Devin is similar to tools like auto-GPT - the LLM is the base technology, but it has the ability to perform actions, then react to feedback it gets from those actions.

Devin can also train its own AI models which means it will only get better from here.

Devin smashes other LLM tools on the Software Engineering benchmark - a test that shows if an AI can solve real world issues on Github.

AI usually sucks at this benchmark - GPT-4 for example, gets the job done only 2% of the time while Devin sits at 14%. This is a huge improvement, but solving real world issues only 14% of the time is still not good enough to replace most software engineers.

This is the lowest it will ever be, which means improvements could see “AI employees” reaching close to solving 99% of real world issues soon.

Devin is already doing real jobs on Upwork and getting paid for it. It's official, they’re taking our jobs…

Cognition recently raised over $21M from investors like Peter Thiel’s Founders fund and the Collison brothers from Stripe. The startup is pre-revenue and only has a team of about 10 employees.

Cognition is not the only “AI employee” startup in the game. Another big player is Magic that raised over $145M to build another AI software engineer. 

This is proof that silicon valley does want to replace programmers with AI - whoever does it first will make a lot of money…

Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia even said “ It is our job to create computing technology such that no one has to program”. “ Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of Artificial Intelligence”.

As of now, Devin remains non-public with access only available to select customers including Bloomberg.