Scott Wu: AI is shifting from text completion tools to autonomous agents
Scott Wu · 🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R) · Jul 28, 2025 · at 1:18:06
Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition AI (creators of Devin), describes the industry evolution from autocomplete code assistants to fully autonomous software engineering agents.
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“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 prefix and it completes the suffix from there. And so if you think about ChatGPT, If you think about a lot of these Q&A products, if you think about, you know, writing marketing copy or answering customer support or even GitHub Copilot and Cursor and products like that, you know, obviously very, you know, a lot of these are really great products and very natural use case where you have the prefix so far and you're asking the model to complete what's next in the suffix, right? And it does that for you and that's a tool that's useful, right? And I think we're entering this new wave where, you know, We're going beyond that and actually introducing some amount of autonomous decision making, and obviously, you know, that's typically referred to in our space as agents”
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