Cognition CEO Scott Wu announced that his two-year-old AI coding agent startup raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, marking a significant milestone for the company. Cognition is the creator of Devin, one of the first and arguably most successful AI coding agents. Wu emphasized that Devin 'naturally owns tasks end to end,' but he clarified that the company's vision is not to replace human programmers. 'We’ve never thought about it as replacing humans,' he said. 'It has never been our view.' In a blog post announcing the raise, Cognition outlined a vision of 'a world of self-driving software development.' However, Wu cautioned against interpreting this as a path to full automation. 'We are all programmers ourselves,' he explained, adding that he started coding at age nine. Wu, who has been called one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers, noted that the goal of Devin is to act as a 'buddy' who helps developers create more, not to take over their work. Cognition claims that Devin contributes to 89% of the code committed by its engineers, with the remaining 11% handled by local agents in Windsurf, the AI coding competitor it acquired last year. Wu highlighted that Devin is particularly effective at handling long-tail maintenance tasks that many programmers find tedious. 'Agents will free programmers from a lot of the toil, and so they can do much more of the creation side,' he said. *Source: [techcrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/29/cognitions-scott-wu-says-ai-coding-agents-shouldnt-replace-humans/)*