Cognition AI
also referred to as: cognition
includes Cognition Devin
56 statements across 18 episodes · 27 bullish · 5 bearish · 14 people on the record · first statement Apr 27, 2024 by Shawn Wang · said 135 times in 44 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Shawn Wang (35), Lance Martin (10), Dylan Davis (8), Joubin Mirzadegan (6), John Yang (6), Alessio Fanelli (6), Walden Yan (3), Ronak Malde (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 31 mentions in 14 episodes 2 per episode
- Devin’s 80% Moment: Background Agents, 7x PRs, & End of Hand-Held Coding — Walden Yan & Cole Murray
- The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
- Podcast Crossover: AIE, AGI, frontier lab strategy with @matthew_berman and @swyxtv
- ⚡️Every product of the future will be a living system — Ronak Malde, Trajectory.ai
- Measuring Exponential Trends Rising (in AI) — Joel Becker, METR
- Agent Inference at the "Speed of Light" — How NVIDIA moves like a $4.3 Trillion Startup
- ⏭️ Forward Deployed: Voice AI on what works in 2026
- The Blueprint for Autonomous Work Agents | Gavriel Cohen, NanoClaw
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 96 mentions in 25 episodes 4 per episode
- 🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
- Context Engineering for Agents - Lance Martin, LangChain
- ⚡️Anthropic vs Cognition on Multi-Agents: A Breakdown with Dylan Davis
- AI to AE's: Grit, Glean, and Kleiner Perkins' next Enterprise AI hit — Joubin Mirzadegan, Roadrunner
- [State of Code Evals] After SWE-bench, Code Clash & SOTA Coding Benchmarks recap — John Yang
- DeepWiki: The GitHub Encyclopedia
- ⚡️Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Anthropic's roadmap for Agents and Developers — Mike Krieger, Anthropic
- The Great Evals Debate — Ankur Goyal & Malte Ubl
- 17 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Building AGI in Real Time (OpenAI Dev Day 2024)
- The State of AI Startups in 2024 [LS Live @ NeurIPS]
- 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
- Language Agents: From Reasoning to Acting — with Shunyu Yao of OpenAI, Harrison Chase of LangGraph
- The Winds of AI Winter (Q2 Four Wars of the AI Stack Recap)
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
Everything said about Cognition AI, oldest first
Apr 27, 2024 positive
Sep 27, 2024 neutral
Dec 2, 2024 positive
Jan 28, 2025 positive
AI agent moats lie in business interfaces, where Devin leads significantly
“I think that may be where most of the, like, if there's any mode here, it's gonna be around, like, the interfaces into humans and their businesses. And Devon, like, has a major, major lead on, on making that work really well.”
May 21, 2025
May 21, 2025
Silas Alberti: DeepWiki scaled infrastructure for tens of thousands of developers
“I think the particular thing that we had to make happen for DeepWiki was, like, scaling up the infra so we could support, like, tens of thousands of open source developers at the same time. And I think also just, like, Making it be, there's like no sign up req…”
May 21, 2025 bullish
Alberti: DeepWiki compute spend may break $1M soon
“So we think we should be now at like the high, like tens of thousands of repos. So I guess you can like do the rough map. Like we might be approaching quite significant numbers of compute spend here. I mean maybe we'll like break the million soon.”
May 21, 2025 positive
Alberti: Multi-Turn RL Enables Aggressive Code Optimization Over Single-Turn Models
“Basically the single-turn model that was just trained on, like, getting the best result after one turn. It would basically be a little bit, like, too careful, because it couldn't risk writing, like, non-compiling code, whereas, like, the multi-turn model would…”
May 21, 2025
May 21, 2025
May 21, 2025
May 21, 2025 negative
Alberti: Setting up dev environments is Devin's highest onboarding hurdle
“So Devon actually needs, like, a full dev environment to be set up. And I think you guys probably both went through this when you onboarded with Devon. It's, like, probably, like, the highest friction onboarding point that we still need to, like,”
May 21, 2025 neutral
Alberti: Cognition is based in SF after early nomadic hacker houses
“We're actually mainly based here in SF. I mean, yeah, the founding mythology is, I think we were a nomadic company in the beginning. So we had hacker house in different places. I think the first one was actually in Burning Game. Then it was in New York, then b…”
May 21, 2025 positive
May 21, 2025 neutral
Alberti: Cognition built its own in-house vector database
“This culture of like building everything in-house. It's also kind of funny, like we, there's like a rack component to this. And I've been actually, I personally advocate, I can just like use a vector database and make life easy. But then there's a really stron…”
Jul 5, 2025 positive
Davis: Sequential Single Agents Succeed in Coding via Cumulative Context Passing
“By doing this approach with single agents, you're likely going to achieve More success, because you have all the context from previous agents. The reason it's beneficial is that all the actions taken previously are baked into that next agent's context, so it d…”
Jul 5, 2025 negative
Davis: Multi-Agent Systems Struggle in Coding Due to Strong Sub-Task Coupling
“When using a multi-agent architecture versus a single agent for coding. And the main issue is that these are dependent upon each other. They're strongly coupled in the sense that when I take an action, that action then is impacts all the other sub-agents if it…”
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Wang: Windsurf employees received 10 to 12 poaching emails during merger weekend
“And I don't think it was reported, but like time was not our friend. We had customers like starting to email like, Hey, what's the, what's going to happen to the company. And we had recruiters. I think almost every employee probably got like 10 or 12 recruitin…”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Wang: Other companies and VCs sought deals with Windsurf before Cognition merger
“When Scott, when I talked to Scott, it was just like, Hey, this kind of makes sense. Like there was other companies. That were interested. There was actually VCs that wanted to invest. But Scott, as a person with Russell, and then I was with Graham just talkin…”
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Scott Wu: There will be way more software engineers than ever
“And so, you know, I think software engineering, the job that we call software engineering is going to change, but I think practically, like, there's actually going to be way more software engineers than ever, you know, and I think there's a lot of precedent fo…”
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Scott Wu: AI is shifting from text completion tools to autonomous agents
“The first wave of generative AI is what I generally call these text completion products, right? And, you know, that makes a lot of natural sense if you think about it that obviously the interface of a language model is text completion, right? You give it a pre…”
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Scott Wu: Software engineering is investigative work suited to autonomous agents
“There's so much more to being a software engineer than typing the code, right? A lot of the work that you're going to do is, you know, you're going to be looking into a bug, You're going to be looking at the different files of the code base. Maybe you're going…”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Scott Wu: AI will make engineers 5-10x more effective
“I think, you know, our demand for software to be built is actually probably a lot more than 10 X what we're currently getting, and so, you know, I think what happens is we get to open up the power of software engineering to a lot more people, and every single …”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Wu: Autonomous coding agent capability currently doubles every 70 days
“What you see in general is that that doubling time is about every seven months, which already is pretty crazy, actually, but in code, it's actually even faster. It's every 70 days, which is two or three months, and so, you know, if you look at various software…”
Jul 28, 2025 bullish
Jul 28, 2025 neutral
Scott Wu: No customer or training data was shared in Windsurf transaction
“There was no, no, no information that was given out, for example, in terms of customer data, training data, any things like that. And so, so, you know, all of that is, is, is strictly proprietary and then remains, you know, our exclusive access.”
Aug 6, 2025 bullish
Swyx: Windsurf will stick around as an active product post-acquisition
“I think Windsurf as a product is going to stick around, and people who really like Windsurf, I mean, I was a Windsurf user for a long time we are going to keep using it because it fills a need, and like, obviously, Cognition bought it for a reason.”
Sep 11, 2025 positive
Martin: Multi-agent systems excel at parallel read-only tasks, not writing tasks
“I like the take that apply multi-agents to problems that are easily parallelizable, that are read-only, for example, context gathering for deep research, and do, like, the final quote-unquote write, in this case report writing, at the end. I think this is tric…”
Sep 11, 2025 positive
Oct 1, 2025 bullish
Feldman: AI startups are replacing closed-source models with fine-tuned open-source
“I think for sort of AI companies like Cognition, like all your competitors, like AlphaSense, like dozens of others, they are trying to replace closed source models with very, very fast open source models, and they're trying to drive the open source Accuracy dr…”
Nov 10, 2025 bullish
GitHub Agent HQ supports third-party agents like Claude Code and Cognition
“Switching gears to GitHub. Like we are all about model choice now and like making sure that and what's cool is that like, it's, we also have copilot, which is our harness. And co-pilot CLI, but we also have third party partners like Cloud Code and Codex and Co…”
Dec 7, 2025 neutral
Dec 11, 2025
Pricing AI inference per million tokens is amateur thinking at enterprise scale
“A lot of people think about cost in terms of dollars per million tokens, right? And I think that that is actually amateur thinking. This only, only the kind of pricing you care about if you're a solo developer, but once you're in a large scale, like you guys a…”
Dec 31, 2025 bullish
Dec 31, 2025 neutral
Dec 31, 2025 positive
Yang: SWE-bench adoption took off only after Cognition's Devin launch
“You know, we put it out October, 22, 23, and then people didn't really touch it too much. And then, of course, like, Cognition came on the scene, and Devon was an amazing release, and I think after that, it kind of kicked off the arms.”
May 28, 2026 neutral
Yan: Practical multi-agent setups require isolated sandboxes without shared machines
“We've actually given Devon an MCP so they can just go arbitrarily message other Devons and create new Devons, et cetera. But I guess like it somehow creates like a really chaotic world in that sense. And so we, we've still found that most practical use on a da…”
May 28, 2026 negative
Yan: Getting agent integrations right often requires bespoke builds over MCP
“The thing we found is, so like MCPs obviously it has been like, it's like really big explosion of, oh, you can go like integrate it with all these different things. But to actually get the integration right and get the right experience, oftentimes we found tha…”
May 28, 2026
Yan: Cognition built Blockdiff to speed up Devin VM state restoration
“The blockdiff file storage format, which is a file system format that we built so that the VMs could be spun up and down very quickly. Basically, the intuition behind this is imagine you have like a terabyte of disk And your agent only like wrote like a hundre…”
May 28, 2026
Yan: Cognition uses nested Firecracker virtualization for beta Android support
“Another thing that we've actually recently added support now for, it's in beta, is doing Android development. To do that, we needed to support, I think, nested virtualization within our machines, because the VM itself is like a, is a virtualized firecracker in…”
May 28, 2026 positive
May 28, 2026 positive
May 28, 2026
Yan: Local agents should defer decisions; cloud agents must test autonomously
“So the funny thing here is that the behavior between local agents and cloud agents, I think that is actually a bit different in their ideal state. I think local agents, you want them to be a bit more fast and let the user make the call on things. Actually don'…”
May 28, 2026 positive
May 28, 2026 bearish
Yan: Autonomous agent sandboxes require full VMs instead of Docker containers
“Docker containers, not really a true security boundary for one. But the other is like, if you are running real applications, a lot of times those applications use Docker and then you have to think about Docker and Docker, which is like really weird. And so I t…”
May 28, 2026 neutral
May 28, 2026 neutral
Yan: Devin requires orchestrating multiple frontier models for end-to-end app testing
“Well, in some cases we found that actually no one frontier model can actually do this full end-to-end task itself. We've seen cases where we actually had had to orchestrate different frontier models together to kind of solve this problem together.”
May 28, 2026 positive
May 28, 2026 negative
Yan: Agent VM grep is slow due to S3-backed network file systems
“A lot of these virtual machines actually underlying them don't use real file systems. They use these like network file systems where things are actually cached over the network actually in S three. So when you're grepping, you're actually making network calls …”
May 28, 2026
Yan: Early Devin state restorations on cloud VMs took 10 minutes
“When we just built it off of raw VMs from cloud providers like EC two, the boot up time Was so slow. I think and especially the, then like turning off the machines, saving them, and then to be able to bring them back up again when the, when you want Devon to w…”
May 28, 2026 neutral
Yan: Roughly 95% of Devin's memories are auto-generated
“I find that, like, 95%, I think some crazy stuff like that of the memories that Devin has are all through these auto-generated things. Like, very few people actually just want to sit down and write big docs on, okay, here's how you're supposed to work with the…”
Jul 8, 2026 neutral
Jul 10, 2026 bullish
Swyx: Specialized agent labs like Cursor, Cognition, and Harvey will endure
“There will always be capability overhangs. They may not stay still, and so you gotta be nimble. But the Sierras of the world, the Cognitions of the world, the Cursors of the world, the Decagons and Harvey's, these are all agent labs for their field. They can b…”