Wu: Within five years, software engineering will just be describing what to build
Scott Wu · From Math Prodigy to AI Genius: How Scott Wu Built Devin · Joe Lonsdale · Jun 12, 2025 · at 20:39
Cognition AI CEO Scott Wu discusses the future of programming and autonomous AI software engineers with Joe Lonsdale.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And I think that's kind of what we're going to get to over the next, I'll call it like five or so years is a point where Software engineering. We might even still call it software engineering or programming or whatever, but it's, it really is just you telling your computer, here's exactly what you need to build. I'm gonna, you know, let's, let's, let's add a new page on this website or let's add a new table and store this and that information and just make sure this is ready to load or, you know, this button could be a little bit rounder. Let's go and do that. And it just happens.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Scott Wu
Wu: Reinforcement learning will eventually beat any benchmark with a clear feedback loop
“I think the natural conclusion of RL, which is what we're kind of getting to, is you basically can solve any benchmark, which is insane to think about... Which means like, if you have a clean set of environments, if you have a good feedback loop to decide what…”
Wu: Devin routinely delivers 6x to 20x efficiency gains for enterprise customers
“We pretty routinely see spots where we can make things like anywhere from six X to 20 X more efficient.”
Wu: Students should still study computer science despite AI coding advances
“People ask me all the time, you know, it's my son or daughter is, 16, you know, should they even be studying computer science? And I always say, yeah, absolutely. And I think the reason is because these are, you know, the concept level things that actually all…”
Wu: Lowering barrier to coding will drastically increase total software built
“And I think we're going to see something similar here where it's, you know, imagine, imagine the w w w what we will do, you know, when we get to the point where everyone can just build products and websites and apps and whatever it is of that level of quality …”
Wu: The duration of autonomous AI coding tasks doubles every three months
“And the crazy thing is over the last like three, four years, that number has basically, it's doubled approximately every three months.”
Wu: Raw intelligence is no longer the bottleneck in AI
“I think what it kind of shows, I would say is actually, I think we're at a point now where intelligence actually isn't the bottleneck, if that makes sense. You know, I think these models are capable of solving some really, really hard problems.”