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Wu: AI agents enable software engineers to focus 10x more on architecture

Scott Wu · How AI Agents Are Creating 12X Productivity Gains · Joe Lonsdale · Mar 27, 2026 · at 17:58

Scott Wu, co-founder and CEO of Cognition, explains how Devin alters the day-to-day role and leveraged productivity of software engineers.

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“10% of that job is basically this really fun part of just pure problem solving, thinking about what you want to build, being creative, like understanding the different solutions, deciding, okay, what architecture makes sense here? How exactly am I going to, you know, achieve my goals here? What do I want to build? Right. And then 90% of the job is once you've figured out all of those parts, just doing all the dirty work of the implementation to go make that happen. And there's like a million bugs that your customers have reported for you and you have to deal with this messy migration or this upgrade to make your stuff still work. Or like you have to go implement all the little cases and all the little details and like write all the, you know, the front end code that, that serves this thing that you just built. Right. And I think what we're seeing is that the best engineers are just doing 10 times more of the first part because you don't have to do that 90%, right? You have an agent, you have Devon that's going to go and do that for you.”

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