Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: Cognition measured 6x to 12x productivity gains with Devin in 2024
“And, you know, relatively quickly by like late 20, 24, we were measuring You know, somewhere between a six to 12 x productivity gain for those types of projects. Meaning that, you know, one hour of human time spent managing Devin was worth like six to 12 hours…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: Software will enter hyper-deflation and output will jump 1000x
“We're going to enter this like hyper deflationary cycle of software where it's so easy to build. It's so abundant. That doesn't mean that people are going to, you know, stop producing software. They're actually going to produce thousands of times more software…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: AI will cause an explosion in small businesses
“One thing I'll go on the record on is I think there's going to be an explosion in small businesses. I think AI is actually like an extremely small business enabling technology in particular”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: Devin became top contributor to own codebase by Summer 2024
“It took us until Summer of 2024 for Devon to become the number one contributor to its own code base, like which was like the first real milestone.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: Major regulated firm automatically resolves 70% of security alerts with Devin
“One of the largest regulated firms in the world, they do very thorough sort of security vulnerability scanning on their code... And they're remediating 70% of these automatically now in production with Devon.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: English specifications will eventually replace code as the source of truth
“And eventually, you know, are we going to like have English as a source of truth and people are just going to be collaborating on specs? Yes.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: AI will trigger an explosion in new small businesses
“I actually think one thing I'll go on the record on is I think there's gonna be an explosion in small businesses.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: Every engineer on Cognition's special projects team is a former founder
“We have one team at the company they're called special projects engineers. And basically every person on that team is a former founder, like every single one.”
Disclosure
Kaplan: Cognition hires 17- and 18-year-olds for engineering
“The engineering team, we have seventeen-year-olds, we have eighteen-year-olds, we have really young folks, and then but we'll take anyone at any age as long as they're ready to grind and ready to have a big impact.”
Insight
Kaplan: Software engineers must reset their AI workflows every three months
“I mean, every three months you have to throw out your previous experience and build new experience because the tools get so much better.”
Insight
Kaplan: AI prompt-to-code shifts software development from scarcity to abundance
“It used to be the case that you have this entire software development life cycle and every step of that cycle, Is oriented around not wasting the super precious time of engineers writing code. And now you have suddenly this overflowing abundance of the ability…”
Insight
Kaplan: Software engineers should never let AI agents idle overnight
“At Tesla, we had one mantra, which was you know, never go to sleep while the GPUs are idling. You know, if you let your cluster idle overnight, that's just a huge waste of resources. Just kick off some experiments, you know, before you go to bed so you can wak…”
Disclosure
Kaplan: Goldman Sachs tuned Devin for proprietary internal programming languages
“Goldman Sachs has invented some of their own programming languages. People don't know this, but Goldman has like a pretty insane internal engineering team and they've literally written their own programming languages and they've been able to sort of customize …”
Disclosure
Kaplan: Cognition has dozens of FedRAMP deployments across military and primes
“Right now we have dozens of kind of fed ramped deployments of cognition both with agencies and with primes. You know, we work with US Army, US Navy, the Treasury we work with folks like Palantir, with Andrel and other primes”
Insight
Kaplan: Frontier engineering problems are easier to solve than institutional inertia
“A lot of times it's actually easier to solve like a frontier science or engineering problem than it is to sort of change the molasses of the existing world”
Assertion Partly supported
Kaplan: US government spends $100B annually on IT modernization
“The government spends a hundred billion dollars a year on just IT modernization.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kaplan: Every engineer on Cognition's special projects team is a former founder
“We have one team at the company they're called special projects engineers. And basically every person on that team is a former founder, like every single one.”
