The First Fully Autonomous AI Software Engineer
Nabs a $21 million Series A led by Founders Fund....
The AI World is very interesting, after “The First AI Hardware sold $10M in 5 days”, “The First Humanoid Robotic Unicorn: AI+Robot” and “The First AI Search Unicorn is Coming”, today here comes “The First AI Software Engineer”.
Cognition Labs, a startup you almost certainly haven’t heard of announced the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer: Devin.
It just nabs a $21 million Series A led by Founders Fund. Other investors include Patrick and John Collison, Elad Gil, Sarah Guo, Chris Re, Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, Erik Bernhardsson, Tony Xu, Fred Ehrsam and so many more.
Here’s what Cognition’s blog says about Devin:
Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review.
With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals.
Devin can:
Plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions.
Recall relevant context at every step, learn over time, and fix mistakes.
Actively collaborate with the user. Reports on its progress in real time, accepts feedback and works together with you through design choices as needed.
Demos from Cognition shows it can:
Learn how to use unfamiliar technologies. Such as after reading a blog post, it runs ControlNet on Modal to produce images with concealed messages.
Build and deploy apps end to end. Such as making an interactive website that simulates the Game of Life.
Autonomously find and fix bugs in codebases, even train and fine tune its own AI models.
Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own.
Bloomberg says Cognition has a 10-person team, the founders of Cognition are CEO Scott Wu; CTO Steven Hao, and CPO Walden Yan. The founding team has 10 IOI gold medals.
People from tech and ventures are very excited about Devin. Stripe cofounder and CEO Patrick Collison:
These aren't just cherrypicked demos. Devin is, in my experience, very impressive in practice.
OpenSea’s CTO Alex Atallah:
This is the first AI agent I've used that feels like a real, useful person is on the other end. Getting status updates like "Looking in the docs for how to set up the Docker container" and "Fixing an issue with connecting to the database," plus having visibility on what Devin is seeing, make this a truly unique experience.
Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam:
First time I have seen an AI take a complex task, break it down into steps, complete it, and show a human every step along the way - to a point where it can fully take a task off a human's plate. All built in just a few months.
Creator of Ruby on Rails, Co-owner & CTO of 37signals DHH:
Best ad I've ever seen for switching to Ruby. You should enjoy these last few years as manual programmers in luxury and style. Go out in a flaming ball of glory.
Peter Thiel sees Cognition as being in the same league as the heavies Founders Fund has backed, which include DeepMind, OpenAI and Scale AI.