Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition, reflects on how quickly developer tooling evolved from simple code completion to autonomous agents like Devin.
Insight
Wu: Running parallel AI agents turns every engineer into an engineering manager
“One of the cool kind of features of Devon, I'd say, is, you know, if, as an engineer, you're working on, let's say, four different tasks today, you know, you just give one to Devon number one, you give the second one to Devon number two, the third one to Devon…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2030
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wu: AI automation will expose junior engineers to core architecture earlier
“You know, I think what happens, honestly, is I think that demand is going to just keep rising with supply. And I think the training process is going to change a little bit, but, you know, I think a lot of these core fundamentals of, you know, if you think of s…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wu predicts AI coding agents will advance 16x to 64x in 12 months
“And I think that, you know, we're gonna see another 16 to 64 X over the next 12 months as well.”