Scott Wu of Cognition on AI agents shifting engineers from 'bricklayers' to 'architects'

be shipping, you know, updates to five, but what what what are you most excited about? Uh where where are you most excited about uh going forward?

And and just really quickly, give us the date that GBC 6 launches.

Oh man, hopefully we uh hopefully hopefully six launches as a complete surprise to everyone. I think that would be ideal.

Like a Beyonce album.

Well, yeah. Hopefully five just makes it and says, "Hey, it's ready now if you want if you want to hit."

Yeah, I think that would that would be a great thing for six, actually. I would love for six to do all of the launchcoms and and to do the live stream. That would be really great.

Live streaming is uh that's the real AGI test

for sure. For sure.

I feel like we're not that far off actually. I don't know.

We're getting there.

I mean, video synthesis maybe, but you know,

talking through a script for 30 minutes. Come on. Models got to be able to do that

for sure. Well, yeah, that'll be the the the the next Sora launch or something. We'd love to have you back on. But thank you so much for taking the time today. We'll talk to you soon.

Great to talk to you guys soon.

Congratulations. Cheers. Bye.

Congrats on the launch.

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How's it going?

It is fantastic.

Got to be honest. Great week to be an application layer company. I got to tell you guys,

I was about to say the best thing ever. Another win for Scott Woo. Wow. Wow. Wow.

4.1.

Yes. Uh so, yeah. How how big is this? Is it are we in the are we in the Uber lift uh territory where you know, you're going to be uh you know, in price competition between anthropic and open AI going back and forth like what what is the real benefit to your business right now from today?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, first of all, obviously massive capability gains across the board. I think really really impressive work that OpenAI has put together. um you know people have talked about uh what's going on in the AI coding model race and and I think by a lot of accounts you know anthropic has generally been ahead for for for a lot of the last year honestly and I think at this point open AI is is very clearly you know has very clearly caught up and it's it's pretty neck and neck I'd say between the two right now and so um very exciting to to to see all of this unfold and to see what's next but but I think from our perspective um yeah I mean code is is just such a um such a core capabilities pill use case I'll call it. Um and so you know being able to work with smarter and smarter models um and do a lot of the work that we do it just means that both Devon and Windsor can be a lot more capable um a lot more intelligent can predict what you want to write or what you want to do um uh with a lot of higher accuracy.

Yeah, it's almost it's almost like surprising that given the like cultural rigor at cognition that you're not doing fundamental frontier research. So can you walk me through like what is the what is the focus of being an application layer company? Is it is it UI go to market? I'm sure it's all of these, but in terms of the the hardcore software engineering, like what is important to get right at some point there's fine-tuning and post- training, but is that moving back into the purview of the foundation labs or is there still work that you want to do on top of the models or on top of the APIs?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. Like I I mean I think the uh the core of being, you know, an applied lab is is really just focusing on a very particular use case on delivering real real just very direct results. And I think um you know like I I think the foundation labs are obviously, you know, incredible at training base models and and all this pre-training and and all the work that they do there. I think from our perspective, we um we we want to work on a lot of very particular capabilities that apply to software engineering in particular. and then obviously you know run the whole stack from there to building a product figuring out the interface and and the UX and then obviously bringing that to market and selling that. Um on on the capability side, there's a lot of particular stuff where um you know, one way to put it is I think the base IQ is very much already there in the models and you can see the the raw problem solving ability and I mean we've gotten some pretty insane results. You know, getting a gold medal at the IMO or all these other things, right?

You called that, by the way,

you called I think the first I mean we were one point away to be fair a year ago, right? So it was it it was on the way I'd say. Um but but but but yeah so so so you know you can really see the general intelligence improving it with every single model generation. On the other hand for Devon obviously um you know it's a very clear like step up in the general intelligence but also you want to be able to you know if you ask Devon to to go debug your Kubernetes or to go and you know look look into your error logs and figure what figure out what went wrong or or or things like that. there's often a lot of very specific capabilities and and that's where we find that you know the post- training of the RL is is is most effective there and a and a lot of the kind of various work around the models that that turns out to be useful.

What about speed? A lot of people that have gotten access to GPT5 are are uh at least in our chat are reporting that it just feels really really quick. How how is that uh over time going to impact the I think a lot of people you know if they're using Devon today task Devon with something and then maybe they go work on something else for a little bit or they're running multiple agents concurrently but at some point the agent could get so fast that you're just sort of like watching it and work in real time and you actually want to be engaged. But uh are we there yet? Is it still a ways out? What do you think?

Yeah, it's a great question. I I think in general I think async will continue on as a paradigm even as the models get faster and faster. One of the reasons that it should by the way is because there are a lot of real world uh thresholds that start to matter like at some point you're actually spending less time on token generation um in the Devon life cycle and you're spending more time on every time Devon runs the command to go install packages or Devon running the unit tests or like Devon pulling up the front end by itself or or or things like that that obviously take real world time, right? Um I think we are honestly getting closer and closer to that threshold. But yeah, so so long story short, I I think like um in the asynchronous mode, uh yeah, these things will get faster. You know, we'll see those gains or we'll be able to spend a lot more time, for example, thinking about a single um um problem relative to the amount of like real world clock time that gets spent. Uh I think for the synchronous use cases is where we'll see things really really um um you know exploited with with speed which is you know windsurf and cascade for example um where where we see the speed gains really really matter.

Uh speaking of windsurf give us the update on the wind the chat wants to know about the windf uh and the 80hour demand. Uh how have the the buyout offers gone? What's the internal response been? Where'd that idea even come from?

Yeah. Yeah. Look, people people are stoked honestly. Um, and I think I think from our perspective, it's ob obviously really important to to kind of just like um unite and get to the point where we can just be one culture and and one kind of shared uh set of values and and this is how things are at Cognition. It's you know it's it's it's a pretty busy time like we we are at the inflection point of code and and we work like that too. Um and and so I think a lot of it for folks is is just kind of like

um you know we want to make sure folk folks who who who who really want to do this with us, you know, make that conscious decision to opt in and for for anyone who doesn't. Obviously, we totally understand that there a lot of talented folks that maybe that's just not the right thing for them right now or, you know, not at this time. Um um and so wanted to make sure that they were well well taken care of, too.

And to be clear with the buyout offer, that's on top of the actual acquisition deal that already went through. They already got

they already got fully vested. So yeah, I was thinking of the roller coaster. It's like you have the OpenAI deal, then the Google deal, then the the Cognition deal, and then they're like, "Wait, these guys work really, really hard. I don't know if I'm cut out for this." And they come back up again where they're like, "Wait, I can just go, you know, take a sabbatical and and figure out my next thing." So it's a great outcome.

Yeah. Yeah. No, for obviously is, you know, overall is a killer team that's been through a lot and so um wanted to make sure that they're well taken care of.

Yeah.

That's fantastic. Um uh any anything else you can tell us about the integration of Devon and Windsurf? How are the teams getting along? How do you see the products playing together in the long term? Obviously Crossell seems really obvious. They had the go to market team as well, but uh but how else are you thinking about the interaction maybe over the longer term there?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. A lot of obvious integration on the team as you mentioned with Crossout and so on. I I think the thing that's really exciting on products um which which I think actually comes along with the the these capabilities increases is you know as the capabilities keep getting better you start to take on harder and harder tasks with AI and with full agentic workflows right and I think there's an interesting thing that happens where for a lot of the harder tasks you really actually do want to go back and forth between a synchronous and an asynchronous mode you know a and that's for a few reasons you know one of the reasons obviously is because there's a lot of review and and a lot of like looking at the pieces and and thinking about the the um uh you know all all the minutia and the details of what you're implementing. I think another big reason for it is, you know, when you get started on on a larger project, you know, let's say you're you're sitting down as an engineer and you're saying, "All right, I'm going to go build this whole project today." You yourself don't actually know all the trade-offs you want to make, all the decisions that you want to make and so on, right? And so having a format where, you know, for the decisions that need you to be there and you're involved setting the kind of the strategy or or figuring out high level what should happen, you're able to do that in a nice synchronous environment, which is naturally the the Windsorf IDE, right? And then for the parts of the task that you can actually hand off and have an agent work on, you're you're giving that to Devon. Um, and figuring out how you