AI has changed software engineering more in the last 3 years than it has changed in the previous 30. What’s needed is not a debate about whether it’s going away—instead it’s a serious discussion about its future: What are the new primitives, techniques, and best practices for software engineering... in the age of AI. That’s why I brought Scott Wu (Scott Wu) on AI & I. He’s the founder of Cognition, the company behind the world’s first autonomous AI coding agent, Devin. Cognition got to $73M ARR in less than 2 years—and they just acquired Windsurf to accelerate their growth. I had Scott on the show to talk about where the programming goes from here. We get into: - What the new tools and workflows are for AI engineers. In the near term, Scott sees software engineering defined by a spectrum of tools. At one end are AI features that speed up coding, like tab complete; at the other are agentic systems, like Devin, that can take on tasks independently. Until engineers can operate entirely at the higher layer of abstraction, he argues, both are essential. - Why Scott thinks AGI is already here. By the benchmarks of a decade ago—passing the Turing test, solving hard math problems, and operating agentically—AGI is already here. The line keeps moving, he argues, because humans constantly redefine work around what machines can’t yet do. - Why developers will turn into product architects. Scott sees the long-term future of software engineering as a steady climb up the ladder of abstraction. Just as programming went from assembly to languages like Python and JavaScript, he thinks the future is humans focusing on the product, while AI agents execute. - How Devin stacks up against Anthropic’s Claude Code. Scott credits Claude Code’s success to great product design and the models becoming capable enough to support autonomous workflows. But according to him, the CLI itself isn’t the breakthrough, it’s how a tool fits into a developer’s workflow. Claude Code’s paradigm is that the AI is you, taking the wheel of your computer, he says, while Devin is like the engineer sitting beside you: it runs in its own cloud environment, manages the repo, and improves over time at testing and refining code. This episode of Every 📧’s AI & I is a must-watch for anyone interested in the brass tacks of how AI changes the future of programming. Watch below! Timestamps: Introduction: 00:02:02 Why Scott thinks AGI is here: 00:02:32 Scott’s personal journey as a founder: 00:09:27 Why the fundamentals of computer science still matter: 00:16:55 How the future of programming will evolve: 00:22:30 A new workflow for the AI-first software engineer: 00:26:50 How Devin stacks up against Claude Code: 00:29:33 Reinforcement learning to build better coding agents: 00:40:05 What excites Scott about AI beyond Cognition: 00:50:05show more

Dan Shipper 📧

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