Inside Cognition: Prodigy Culture, Devin, and the Trillion-Dollar Contest

Welcome back to our AI Infrastructure Unicorns series. It’s been a while since the last episode, but we’re back – with a fascinating story of Cognition, the lab that launched Devin. And just last week, the company raised $400 million at a whopping $10 billion valuation. Their story fuses math-prodigy origins, a culture of extreme intensity, and one of the wildest acquisitions in the agent-lab wars. Along the way, they picked up developer-philosopher swyx, whose “Code AGI” thesis reframed Devin not as a product demo but as a trillion-dollar inevitability. And through him, they’ve more or less claimed the whole AI engineer movement. Smart.

We’re starting this deep dive with a quote buried in swyx’s reflection on why he joined Cognition AI. It’s the perfect lens to see a company that went from hacker house to $10B valuation in less than two years. Now, it’s time to substantiate it. Below is the full map – origins, philosophy and culture, product, money, Windsurf drama, critics, risks, TAM, and why swyx is the narrative hinge that makes the whole thing click. Curious to learn more? Let’s go.

In today’s episode:

• How it all started - IOI mafia

• Under immediate scrutiny by human programmers

• When prodigies find their playground

• Cognition’s culture of overachievers

• Digital hands for prodigy brains

• Product – what Devin actually does plus tech spec

• How does Cognition make money

• Financial situation

• Total Addressable Market (TAM) (it’s insane)

• Competition – the convergence on agency

• What is missing in Devin:

  • The Windsurf Rollercoaster Acquisition

  • Mixing swyx in the mix

• Final Thoughts

• Resources used to write this article and further reading

How it all started – IOI mafia

Cognition is what happens when childhood prodigies refuse to slow down as adults. The same intensity that once drove them to solve math problems under time pressure now drives them to build an AI workforce measured in compute units.

There’s a video of Scott Wu in a contest where, before you can even read the body of the problem, he already knows the answer. His voice sounds skeptical – he’s sure he’s right, but wonders how’s the answer isn’t obvious to everyone else.

Cognition AI was officially founded in November 2023 (according to the founders’ Linkedin pages) by Scott Wu (born 1997, 28 years old), Steven Hao (graduated MIT in 2014, so likely 28–29), and Walden Yan (finished high school in 2020, so about 22–23). Each brought an unusually decorated background in competitive programming:

• Wu was a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), a MathCounts national champion, and later co-founder of Lunchclub.

• Hao earned IOI gold in 2014, studied mathematics and computer science at MIT, and was one of the earliest engineers at Scale AI.

• Yan, the youngest, won IOI gold in 2020, placing 19th out of nearly 400 competitors after what he described as “over 1,000 hours” of training in graph theory and dynamic programming. By 2024, he was a Thiel Fellow, dropping out of Harvard to focus on Cognition full time. He was also an early engineer at Cursor.

From the start they felt two shifts coming. First, reinforcement learning would push beyond imitation models like the original ChatGPT. Instead of echoing the internet, high-compute RL could try, fail, get feedback, and improve. Second, products would move from text completion to true agents – systems that can reason, plan, and act over multiple steps.

Code was the obvious domain. Not only were they good at it, but code itself provides its own feedback loop: run it, check it, learn.

When they started, it wasn’t really a company – more like a project, a hackathon. Around Thanksgiving 2023, they rented an Airbnb, pulled in friends, and hacked on ideas. The first build targeted competitive programming problems, using agentic loops to improve test performance.

The form kept shifting. At first, each built their own agent – DevSteven, DevWalden, and so on – which only delivered finished code. The breakthrough came around Christmas 2023, when a prototype fixed a blocked server on its own. That was a revelation: an agent could be a partner – spot errors, recover, and finish the job.

Devin – all the Devs merging into one – was born.

In March 2024, Cognition emerged from stealth. A demo video showed Devin planning, browsing documentation, writing and testing code, and finally opening a GitHub pull request.

The claim: Devin had just completed a real task without hand-holding. The punchline: Devin is “the first AI software engineer” – lifting the phrase swyx had planted in his June 30, 2023 Latent Space post, The Rise of the AI Engineer.

Under immediate scrutiny by human programmers

The launch went viral, with millions of views and heated debate across developer networks: was it really the “first AI engineer”, are software developers cooked?!

On April 6, swyx (again) jumped in: “ignore everyone who hasn’t used it.” In a long twitter post with follow ups, he described how he’d shipped Swift code to the App Store, ported React to Svelte, and wrangled Elixir games with Devin as his “five-engineer team.” His verdict: slow, pricey, bad at design, clumsy with Git – but still the best coding agent he had seen.

A week later, Gergely Orosz, author of the popular Substack Pragmatic Engineer, amplified a YouTube breakdown by the channel Internet of Bugs: Devin is all about staged demo, phantom files, trivial shell commands, work that could have been done by reading the README. Verdict: hype dressed as substance.

The split was instant – AI believers calling Devin a glimpse of the future, hardcore devs calling it smoke and mirrors. Cognition’s team jumped in to clarify:

So from week one, the question was never whether Devin got attention. It was whether it could survive a code review from the very humans it promised to replace. And: was it as much a prodigy as its founders – and could it actually compete at their level? To answer these questions, we need to explain why it matters that the founders of Cognition are prodigies.

When prodigies find their playground

In his show A Cheeky Pint, John Collison (Stripe’s co-founder) asked Scott Wu whether the return of very young founders is a biomarker of industry takeoff. PCs had Dell. Social had Zuckerberg. That’s an interesting point. But I think the situation with Wu, Yan, and their cohort – including Alexander Wang from Scale AI, Demi Guo from Pika, whom Scott mentions in that interview – is different: