Cognition CEO Scott Wu explains how Cognition measures customer success and pull request throughput for AI software engineer Devin.
Opinion
Wu: Devin performs on average like a junior engineer
“We like to call Devon a junior engineer today. There are some things that an AI, of course, is way, way better than all of us at, you know, especially encyclopedic knowledge and just pulling facts and things like that. There are some things that it's, you know…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wu: Enterprises measure 8x to 15x productivity gains using Devin for migrations
“I think in practice what we see with folks, especially in these kind of like enterprise migrations is, is, you know, when folks measure internally, they see something like an eight to 15 X gain for a lot of these use cases with Devon because, Yeah, as you're s…”
Insight
Wu: General AI intelligence alone will not solve messy software engineering
“Software engineering in the real world is so messy, you know, and there's all sorts of these things that come up. And I think in practice, you know, most disciplines look like this. And I would say the same thing about law or medicine or, and so on. And so whi…”
Insight
Wu: Solved AI benchmarks shift bottleneck to defining real-world benchmarks
“The thing is when that happens, I don't think what we end up with is just pure ASI end of humanity, human knowledge work or whatever. I think the thing that we end up in is basically a point where the hard question is, all right, now what is the benchmark, rig…”
Insight
Wu: Seat-based SaaS pricing makes no sense for AI agents
“Seats don't really make sense when it is like, the AI themselves are arguably seats as well, you know, like they're doing a lot of the labor too. And then on the other side, I think you know, usage obviously just goes so naturally with the cogs themselves beca…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wu: Language syntax will matter less than product sense in software engineering
“Yeah, I think what we find is, is, and I think this, you know, we'll see this trend generally in software engineering, which is knowing all the little, memorizing all the facts or knowing all the little details or being really good at Syntax of some language o…”