Wu: Autonomous coding agent capability currently doubles every 70 days
Scott Wu · 🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R) · Jul 28, 2025 · at 3:04:27
Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition (creator of Devin), is giving a keynote on the empirical capability scaling of AI coding agents over the past two years.
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“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 engineering tasks that start from the simplest single functions or single lines, and you go all the way to You know, we're doing tasks now that take hours of human's time, and an AI agent is able to just do all of that, right? And if you think about doubling every 70 days, I mean, basically, you know, every two to three months means you get four to six doublings every year, which means that the amount of work that an AI agent can do in code goes something between 16 and 64 X in a year, every year, at least for the last couple of years that we've seen.”
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