Scott Wu

Scott Wu is co-founder and CEO of Cognition, maker of Devin — the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. Previously founded Lunchclub (AI professional networking, ~5 years). Competitive programming background; met co-founders Steven (early Scale AI) and Walden (early Cursor) through the competitive programming circuit.

Key ideas

• Devin as async junior engineer. Tag it in Slack/Linear, it opens PRs. Cognition’s 15-person team runs 5 Devins per engineer simultaneously; ~25% of PRs from Devin as of recording; expected to exceed 50% by year end.
• RL as the paradigm shift. Code has automated feedback (run it, get pass/fail) — uniquely suited to high-compute RL. Devin’s capabilities come from training on that feedback loop, not just from reading internet text.
• Bricklayer to architect. Engineers move from writing code to specifying intent: problem definition, architecture decisions, scoping, review. The soul of engineering (telling computers what to do) remains; the how belongs to the agent.
• Jagged intelligence. Devin is non-uniform: outperforms humans on some tasks (code search, documentation, routine refactors), requires heavy steering on others. Learning which is which is itself a skill.
• Async-first workflow. Productive pattern: parallelise five tasks; kick off all Devins; check in only where expert judgment is needed; review output rather than watching step-by-step.

Appearances

See also

• Agentic Engineering
• Jagged Intelligence
• Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
• Michael Truell on Cursor and the World After Code