‘Devin’ pitched as first AI SWE
Founders of Cognition AI claim 'Devin'—positioned as the first AI software engineer—can boost productivity 6–12x and modernize legacy IT workflows, spotlighting a trend of AI‑native engineering roles outpacing senior humans. The post frames AI‑native engineers as a rising workforce category. (x.com)
Cognition was founded in November 2023 by Scott Wu, Walden Yan and Steven Hao, a team drawn from competitive programming and ML backgrounds. (tracxn.com) The startup attracted early capital from Founders Fund and Khosla and raised a $175M extension in April 2024 that propelled a rapid private valuation spike, later completing a $400M round at a $10.2B valuation in September 2025. (aibusiness.com) Cognition paid $ to acquire AI coding platform Windsurf on July 14, 2025, taking on Windsurf’s IP, product and remaining team after Google hired several of Windsurf’s leaders. (cognition.ai) Large enterprises have taken Devin into pilots and partnerships: Goldman Sachs began testing Devin with its 12,000-strong engineering org in mid‑2025, Infosys announced a strategic collaboration to scale Devin across enterprise clients on January 7, 2026, and Cognition markets an Azure integration for scaling deployments. (cnbc.com) Cognition’s own performance summaries report Devin producing roughly a quarter of internal pull requests by late 2025 with the company describing ambitions to increase that share toward half of internal PRs. (cognition.ai) Independent benchmark and reporting show a mixed picture: Cognition posted state‑of‑the‑art SWE‑bench results for certain tasks, with one published comparison noting Devin solved 13.86% of SWE‑bench issues versus GPT‑4 at 1.74% and Claude 2 at 4.80%, while technology press reviews found Devin failing many real‑world tasks in independent tests. (cognition.ai)
