Cognition’s Scott Wu says AI coding agents shouldn’t replace humans

Cognition 创始人 Scott Wu：AI 编程智能体不应取代人类

Cognition CEO Scott Wu made headlines again this week when his two-year-old AI coding agent startup raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. Cognition is the maker of Devin, one of the first and, arguably, most successful AI coding agents. Devin, the CEO says, “naturally owns tasks end to end.” In fact, in the blog post announcing that raise, Cognition laid out a vision where “we are shifting to a world of self-driving software development.”

本周，Cognition 首席执行官 Scott Wu 再次登上头条，他那家成立仅两年的 AI 编程智能体初创公司以 260 亿美元的估值完成了 10 亿美元的融资。Cognition 是 Devin 的开发者，这是首批且可以说是目前最成功的 AI 编程智能体之一。Wu 表示，Devin “能够自然地端到端地完成任务”。事实上，在宣布融资的博客文章中，Cognition 描绘了一个愿景，即“我们正在转向一个自动驾驶软件开发的世界”。

So, could Devin replace, say, a mid-level L4 programmer? Yes, and no, Wu told TechCrunch. “We’ve never thought about it as replacing humans. I know it’s like a scenario, folks have said these things. It has never been our view.”

那么，Devin 能否取代一名中级 L4 程序员呢？Wu 在接受 TechCrunch 采访时表示，答案既是肯定的，也是否定的。“我们从未想过要用它来取代人类。我知道这是一种假设场景，人们确实讨论过这些，但这从来不是我们的观点。”

In this wild year of 2026 when every day another tech CEO announces layoffs in the name of supplanting workers with AI, Wu says he especially doesn’t want coders to lose their jobs. “We are all programmers ourselves,” he explained. “I started coding when I was nine.”

在 2026 年这个疯狂的年份里，每天都有科技公司 CEO 以用 AI 取代员工为名宣布裁员，Wu 表示他特别不希望程序员失去工作。“我们自己都是程序员，”他解释道，“我九岁就开始写代码了。”

In fact, Wu has been called one of the most accomplished child competitive programmers of all time, according to a recent profile in Colossus. As a second-grader, Wu won a nationwide math competition for seventh-graders, which launched a childhood filled with math and programming tournaments. It also introduced him to other wunderkinds who went on to launch other AI tech startups, like Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.

事实上，据《Colossus》最近的一篇人物专访显示，Wu 被誉为史上最有成就的少年竞赛程序员之一。在小学二年级时，Wu 就赢得了全国七年级数学竞赛的冠军，这开启了他充满数学和编程竞赛的童年。这也让他结识了其他后来创办 AI 科技初创公司的神童，例如 Scale AI 的创始人 Alexandr Wang。

So, he tells TechCrunch, the idea was never to make human programmers obsolete. “When we started building Devin, it’s kind of a funny thing,” he mused, “but we really just thought of it as: this is your buddy who helps you build more.” In fact, he showed off a little stuffed animal holding a computer, his own Devin teddy bear of sorts, that he keeps on his desk. He thinks of it as a physical symbol of the Devin AI coder “This is my buddy that helps you build more.”

因此，他告诉 TechCrunch，他们的初衷从来不是让程序员过时。“当我们开始构建 Devin 时，这其实挺有趣的，”他沉思道，“我们真的只是把它看作：这是你的伙伴，能帮你构建更多东西。”事实上，他展示了一个抱着电脑的小毛绒玩具，那是他放在桌上的“Devin 泰迪熊”。他将其视为 Devin AI 程序员的实体象征：“这就是帮我构建更多的伙伴。”

Wu doesn’t want AI agents to take the joy of programming away from people. “It’s not a secret, most software engineers love building software, right?” he said. “If you ask them why, what they’ll basically tell you is, ‘Well, it’s like I get to build things from nothing. I can make my whole idea that I have, and turn it into a product. I can turn it into an experience.’”

Wu 不希望 AI 智能体剥夺人们编程的乐趣。“这并不是什么秘密，大多数软件工程师都热爱构建软件，对吧？”他说，“如果你问他们为什么，他们基本上会告诉你：‘嗯，这就像我能从无到有地创造事物。我可以把我所有的想法变成产品，变成一种体验。’”

Just like visual development environments abstracted software creation away from machine instructions, he views agents as another layer of abstraction between envisioning a software product and producing it. Yet, Cognition says that Devin’s role in its own company is to ship nearly all the software. The company says that 89% of code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin, and the rest by local agents in Windsurf, the AI coding competitor it acquired last year.

就像可视化开发环境将软件创作从机器指令中抽象出来一样，他将智能体视为在构思软件产品与生产产品之间的另一层抽象。然而，Cognition 表示，Devin 在其公司内部的角色是交付几乎所有的软件。该公司称，其工程师提交的代码中有 89% 是由 Devin 提交的，其余部分则由去年收购的 AI 编程竞争对手 Windsurf 中的本地智能体完成。

Wu explains that his agent’s role is largely to do the kinds of long-tail maintenance tasks that many programmers don’t like to do anyway: bringing old software up to date; moving applications off one platform and onto another. Agents will free programmers “from a lot of the toil, and so they can do much more of the creation side,” he promises.

Wu 解释说，他的智能体主要负责处理许多程序员本就不喜欢的长尾维护任务：更新旧软件；将应用程序从一个平台迁移到另一个平台。他承诺，智能体将把程序员“从大量的苦差事中解放出来，这样他们就能更多地专注于创造。”

So Wu bristles at the idea of Devin “replacing” human coders. While he says it can work independently, it works at “somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer” depending on the task at hand. As for the concept of self-driving software, where the agent learns and improves itself so that one day it will work at higher levels (“recursive” is the latest buzzword in AI these days), Wu says. “I think we are in for a wild ride.”

因此，对于 Devin “取代”人类程序员的说法，Wu 感到反感。虽然他说它可以独立工作，但根据任务的不同，它的工作水平“介于初级和中级工程师之间”。至于自动驾驶软件的概念，即智能体通过学习和自我改进，终有一天能达到更高水平（“递归”是目前 AI 领域最新的流行词），Wu 表示：“我认为我们将迎来一段疯狂的旅程。”

He sees agents entering other fields where they will learn tasks, from customer service to medicine, but hopes the goal will be to augment human workers in those areas, too. “Code and software has been the first to move, but we’ll see this happen in all these other industries,” he predicts. “One thing that’s been clear to us since the beginning is, it should always be up to the human what to do … you really see this in software engineering, but I think it’s true in all these other professions too.”

他预见智能体将进入其他领域并学习各种任务，从客户服务到医疗，但他希望目标同样是增强这些领域的人类工作者。“代码和软件是第一波浪潮，但我们会在所有其他行业看到同样的情况，”他预测道，“从一开始我们就很清楚的一点是，做什么决定权永远应该掌握在人类手中……在软件工程中确实如此，但我认为在所有其他职业中也是如此。”