Scott Wu: Software engineering is investigative work suited 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 1:19:35
Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition AI, explains why software engineering serves as an ideal domain for autonomous agents over standard text completion models.
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“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 to be running this or that command. Maybe you're going to be pulling up documentation. Maybe you're going to run the front end yourself to reproduce the bug. You know, you look at this thing, you make it, make this edit, you try it again. All of this work here obviously is, you know, that's what software engineering is, right? More so than just typing the code in the file which leads very naturally to an agentic workflow.”
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