Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yan: Agent spending per engineer can reach $50,000
“I've seen numbers go that high for sure.”
Disclosure
Yan: Cognition stripped obsolete Devin code after Sonnet 3.7 release
“So it's almost funny to be talking about how like big of a leaps on it. 3.7 was, and we honestly, a lot of it was stripping out parts of Devon that were no longer needed with that jumping of intelligence.”
Disclosure
Yan: Cognition merged PRs grew 7x as headcount grew only 10%
“It grew like seven X over like the last, I think it was like two months, three months, something like that. And then you see our engineering headcount growth, it's like gone up by like 10% or something.”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
Yan: Agent assertiveness and pushback enables true multi-agent systems
“But I think the thing that gives me the most bullishness that multi-agents might actually be possible is actually what I said earlier about Devon will actually sometimes tell me I'm wrong. And push back. And I think that demonstrates a level of maturity and co…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yan: Claude Opus 4.7 writes detailed PRD-style function comments
“One of the things this new model likes to do is it writes lots of comments, not like, you know, it'll like comment every line, but it'll write like paragraph, like PRDs, like, you know, on top of every function. But I will say to its credit, these aren't slop,…”
Insight
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'…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Disclosure
Yan: Cognition offers in-VPC deployment for Devin across customer clouds
“Now, one thing we offer when we go and Sell Devon to people is, you know, you don't have to worry about all the compute side of things. We'll make it work. We'll make it work in your cloud if you wanted to.”
Disclosure
Yan: Cognition built Devin to separate brain control from machine execution
“I think a lot of that, what you mentioned is why we actually from the start built Devon to what we called separate the brain from the machine.”
Disclosure
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
