Cognition: The Devin Is in the Details (www.swyx.io)

Cognition, the company behind the Devin AI software engineer and now owner of the Windsurf agentic IDE, recently closed a $10 billion Series C funding round just two years after its inception, marking explosive growth in AI-powered coding agents. The author, who has been closely involved with AI Engineer and Latent Space projects, announced joining Cognition and rolling over their previous investments, emphasizing Cognition’s superior positioning in the AI coding landscape. This move highlights the accelerating industry focus on “Code AGI”—an approach that leverages AI to write and understand code as a critical step toward full artificial general intelligence (AGI). Notably, code-based AI captures a major portion of AGI's economic value and can improve recursively by “dogfooding,” setting it apart from other AI domains. The article underscores a pivotal shift from traditional model-centric AI development (“model labs”) to product-first “agent labs” like Cognition, which prioritize shipping usable AI products and adapting frontier models to real-world developer environments. Cognition’s rapid revenue growth—from $1 million ARR to $73 million ARR within nine months—and its efficient business model with positive margins reinforce its sustainability in the competitive AI ecosystem. The company excels in both synchronous and asynchronous coding workflows, exemplified by Devin’s integration with collaborative tools like Slack and Windsurf’s IDE capabilities, catering to a wide range of software engineering personas and workflows. This signals a maturing segment within AI focused on practical, deeply integrated coding assistants that combine scalability, reliability, and enterprise-grade compliance, setting new standards for AI-augmented software development.