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

From math Olympiads to $10 billion in two years: what's their plan?

Author

Ksenia Se
September 14, 2025

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.

“There are gaps in how the Cognition story is told today that hold back recruiting, sales, and even product. We couldn’t say a lot of things we’d want to say because we couldn’t really substantiate them. Fixing that can fix a lot of downstream things.”

Shawn “swyx” Wang

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.

“A lot of us knew each other from competitive programming and math competitions, and we’ve stayed closely connected since. Over the years, teammates have led teams at Neuro, worked at Waymo, or started their own YC-backed ML tools companies. By late 2023, we were excited to finally build something together.”

Scott Wu at Lenny’s podcast

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?!

Software engineers panicking about losing their jobs.

Artists: First time?

comment by samehsharaf3695 under Devin’s demo

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:

all these young men and women are math prodigies. It’s not the return of the young founders; it’s a wave of child prodigies who can finally thrive.

For much of the 20th century, prodigies collided with institutions that dulled their edge. Genius mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan dazzled Cambridge but strained under academic formalism. Alexander Grothendieck revolutionized algebraic geometry yet abandoned the academy, alienated by its politics. Even those who flourished, like John von Neumann, did so largely because wartime America bent its research ecosystem to accommodate brilliance.

The mismatch was structural: hierarchies prized seniority, committees slowed radical ideas, feedback loops rewarded tenure instead of outcomes. For minds trained under clocks and scoreboards, it was suffocating.

Startups flipped the environment. AI craziness accelerated it. Finally, these child prodigies found a world that ran at their pace – fast, unforgiving, and measurable. Flat ownership gave agency from day one. Risk-seeking cultures rewarded speed. Feedback came from launches and ARR, not citations. Suddenly, speed, stamina, and precision – once liabilities – became the perfect fit.

That’s why Wu, Hao, and Yan could turn Olympiad reflexes into a $10B company in less than two years. In another era, they might have been absorbed into Bell Labs or IBM, publishing memos that never saw daylight. In this one, they can be independent, launching Cognition – compressing cycles, chasing measurable outcomes, building visible wins.

Being so young and unattached most likely means they don’t have families (most specifically kids), which adds about 14 free hours to a workday (kidding_notkidding). That’s why they can build that type of culture →

Cognition’s culture of overachievers

In an email to staff, Cognition CEO Scott Wu noted that people at the startup frequently clock 80-hour weeks, and most of the team spends six days a week in the office. The seventh day, he said, is spent “on the phone with each other. 

“We don't believe in work-life balance,” he said, adding, “Going forward, we will be asking all the new employees from Windsurf to commit to the same level of intensity. We are the underdog. The standards of work that this moment demands from us are extreme.”

AI Startups Emulate China’s Hardcore 9-9-6 Work Culture by The Information

Time is also relative for math geniuses. They enter “flow” states more easily than others. And when they do, their emotional world can narrow around a problem – hours feel like minutes. To outsiders this can look obsessive, but inside it often feels calming or exhilarating.

Prodigy-founders shape the culture of the company in a distinct way. Contest programming demands brilliance, but it also requires high endurance under pressure. Competitors face five-hour windows, three problems, and one unyielding clock. The game is about precision, planning, and error recovery – skills that translate directly into the way Cognition builds software. The founders are intensely competitive, and they cannot imagine anyone around them not being the same. In a way, it’s their blinders.

Supporters praised this clarity. Critics called it unsustainable. Either way, it revealed Cognition’s ethos: make intensity explicit.

Digital hands for prodigy brains

Here we arrive at the editorial heart of the Cognition story. Devin is not just an agent but a prosthetic for the overachieving brain.

For prodigies, the constraint has always been physical. One brain, two hands, limited hours. Olympiad competitors can only solve so many problems in five hours, no matter their skill. Startups can compress cycles, but humans still fatigue.

Devin changes that equation. It doesn’t replace ingenuity – it multiplies it, giving overachievers additional brain muscle with digital hands. One engineer can now orchestrate many Devins in parallel, turning individual brilliance into organizational output. Where once one prodigy wrote one solution, now fleets of agents can explore alternatives, attempt migrations, or grind through repetitive tasks in bulk.

This is what makes Cognition different from ordinary startups. It is not simply a company employing prodigies; it is a company that has encoded prodigy habits into its product. Devin carries forward the contest mentality: precise planning, measurable outcomes, relentless retries. It lets others participate in that rhythm, whether or not they trained for years in Olympiad halls.

In this way, Cognition is both a company and a new institutional form: a place where prodigy culture does not clash with structure but becomes the structure itself.

Product – what Devin actually does plus tech spec

Devin is less chatbot than teammate. Each instance runs in its own cloud dev box with a Linux shell, code editor, browser, and toolchain.

Give it a task – through Slack, Linear, Jira, or the web interface – and it will sketch a plan, execute in its sandbox (installing dependencies, editing files, running tests, retrying after errors), then deliver results as a pull request with commits tied back to the ticket.

To make this usable, Cognition layered in a few tools: Interactive Planning for human approval, Devin Search for repo Q&A, Devin Wiki for auto-docs, and MultiDevin to split large jobs across agents.

Where it shines today

Teams report the clearest value on well-scoped tickets that are laborious for humans and easy to verify: version upgrades; dependency and API migrations; large-scale linting and layout fixes; flaky-test hunts; doc and type improvements; on-call triage that starts with reading logs and reproducing bugs. These jobs often make up a large fraction of engineering hours, and they respond well to planning + execution + human review.

Where it still needs shaping

Open-ended product work, ambiguous architecture changes, and cross-team dependencies still require careful scoping. Early independent tests also highlighted brittleness in long sequences and slow time-to-completion on poorly framed tasks. Cognition’s answer has been product-level guardrails: interactive plan approval; code-cited responses; VPC isolation; and a usage model that scales only when work gets done.

Cognition’s answer has been guardrails: force plan approval, surface code-cited context, keep work sandboxed, and measure success by survivability – how long the agent keeps making progress before stalling. A January 2025 Register review put Devin’s success rate on unscoped tasks at about 15%. Blunt, but the critique maps directly to the product choices the team has since doubled down on.

How does Cognition make money

Cognition began with a flat $500/team monthly plan. In April 2025 the company added a $20 pay-as-you-go entry using ACUs – Agent Compute Units – as the billing unit. ACUs measure normalized resource usage; Cognition shows customers how many ACUs a given task consumes and suggests budgets for pilots. The move lowered the barrier to entry and forced a discipline that suits agents: if the work is useful, the meter runs; if it is not, it does not. TechCrunch noted at launch that $20 buys roughly nine ACUs – a couple of hours of “active Devin work” – and warned that costs could rise quickly on massive repos. That warning is exactly the sort of constraint enterprise buyers respect.

Pricing. Image Credit: Cognition

Cognition’s early customers were startups and tech-forward enterprises. By 2025, the roster included Ramp, Nubank, OpenSea, Lumos, and Curai Health. But the signals that matter most are:

  • Goldman Sachs piloting Devin as a “new employee,” a symbolic endorsement from a regulated, high-stakes environment.

  • Nubank publishing results of 8–12× engineering efficiency and ~20× cost savings on a large codebase refactor.

  • Microsoft integrating Cognition in Azure reference architectures.

Revenue tracked those wins. ARR grew from $1M in Sep 2024 to $73M in Jun 2025, with burn under $20M. The shift to a $20 pay-as-you-go entry price with usage-based Agent Compute Units broadened adoption while tying revenue to actual output.

Financial situation

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

is hard to estimate but one thing is clear – it’s huge. According to Evans data, there was ~27 million of developers globally (2024), according to Slash data there is 47.2 million developers globally (quite a difference, huh). Average fully-loaded cost per developer: $100k–$300k per year depending on geography.

If we take the smaller headcount estimate (27M) and the low end of cost ($100k), that implies current global developer labor spend of $2.7T per year. If AI coding agents capture just 5–10% of that value in the near term, the serviceable market is $135–$270B per year. Near term.

On the higher end (47.2M developers at $300k), the same 5–10% capture yields $708B–$1.416T per year. Also, near term.

A seat-pricing cross-check – say $300–$600 per developer per month with 50–80% adoption – gives $49–$272B per year in direct revenue. That lines up with the lower end of the value-capture view.

Here you need to stop and imagine being Scott Wu: he doesn’t have to work through all the calculations – he simply sees the numbers outlined in front of him.

And this doesn’t even count the expansion of software demand: the universe of products that were never economical to build when developer labor was the bottleneck.

What is missing in Devin: 1. IDE and 2. developers love

1. The Windsurf Rollercoaster: OpenAI, Google, and a Rescue Deal

In July 2025, OpenAI came close to buying Windsurf, an agentic IDE startup, for $3B. The deal collapsed at the last minute. Within days, Google DeepMind hired Windsurf’s leadership and licensed its IP for $2.4B – leaving 250 employees stranded.

Cognition moved fast. Over the weekend, Wu and his team struck a deal to acquire Windsurf’s product, brand, and customer contracts. By Monday morning, it was signed. In a market known for hard landings, Cognition’s offer was unusual: every employee participated financially, and vesting was accelerated, even for those still under the one-year cliff.

Two elements stood out. First, the structure – a rare gesture of respect in a week when many felt whiplash. Second, the combination itself: Devin’s autonomous engine joined to Windsurf’s IDE surface and go-to-market machine. Together, they offered enterprises a continuous workflow: plan in the IDE, hand subtasks to Devins, leave judgment calls to humans, and merge in one environment. Press accounts and Windsurf’s interim CEO later described the weekend as chaotic, emotional – and, in the end, a relief.

The strategic prize was clear. Windsurf brought distribution, a strong sales and customer success team, and $82M in annual recurring revenue, doubling quarter over quarter. For Cognition – efficient but not yet scaled – it was transformative. In August, they shipped Wave 12.

2. Mixing swyx in the mix

You might have noticed that Shawn “swyx” Wang appears quite a few times in this article. In September 2025, the same day Cognition announced the $400M round, he tweeted that he was joining the company. It felt like a long-planned move by Scott Wu. If you are competing at the edge, you cannot claim “the first AI software engineer” without also bringing in the person who defined the category of AI engineers.

Devin is not universally loved by software developers, and that is exactly where swyx matters. He has been shifting tides, persuading programmers to see themselves as AI engineers. He is loved in the community, trusted by practitioners, and influential in shaping narratives. These are all the things Cognition lacked.

“Code AGI will be achieved in 20% of the time of full AGI, and capture 80% of the value.”

swyx: “Cognition: The Devin is in the Details”

With this “Code AGI”, swyx reframed Devin not as a product demo but as a trillion-dollar inevitability. Three roles he will play (as we see it) inside Cognition:

The intellectual frame – His phrase above reframes Devin+Windsurf from “ambitious IDE” to the shortest path toward AGI-scale returns. Code is verifiable and recursive; agent teams can dogfood their own tools; the loop is tight. Cognition had the product and some confusion with brands (Devin, Windsurf, Cognition) – he gave it the explanatory scaffolding.

The developer bridge – Through Latent Space and the AI Engineer community, swyx connects to practitioners who adopt tools early. That audience trusts him to separate demo theater from durable capability. His threads turned Cognition’s private cadence into public playbooks. Even if he tries to keep it separate. It’s the reputation that is working.

The translator – Inside a company known for Olympiad-level intensity, he explains the market split in plain terms: model labs train frontier models; agent labs adapt them to domains, stitch workflows, and sell outcomes. Cognition belongs squarely in the latter camp.

Competition – the convergence on agency

Different players are racing toward the same ground from different angles:

  • GitHub Copilot & Copilot Workspace – unmatched distribution, strong autocomplete, and an early agent surface where devs already live.

  • Anthropic’s Claude Code – terminal-native, reasoning-heavy, with enterprise pilots underway.

  • Cursor (Anysphere) – AI-first IDE with revenue traction, optimized for human-in-the-loop editing.

  • Replit Agents – agent flows tied to a fast-growing cloud IDE.

  • Augment, Factory, Cosine/Genie – experiments in long-horizon planning and team-level orchestration.

  • Warp – reimagining the terminal as an Agentic Development Environment, combining agents, shells, and workflows.

But this isn’t winner-take-all terrain. Most developers will blend IDE-centric tools with autonomous agents running off-screen. Cognition’s bet: Devin + Windsurf as the most natural pairing for enterprise backlog compression and modernization.

Final Thoughts

What is Cognition for its founders? At one level, it’s a puzzle that never ends – the same thrill as an Olympiad round, only played at company scale. At another, it’s a contest – with GitHub, Anthropic, Replit, Cursor, Warp, and the rest of the agentic stack circling the same territory. For Wu, Hao, and Yan, the attraction is obvious: a stage where speed, intensity, and precision aren’t eccentric traits but competitive edges. They hacked themselves into a unicorn in under two years because the company became their next scoreboard.

What should we watch for? Three things. First, survivability – how far Devin agents can run before stalling, and whether those guardrails truly bend cost curves. Second, culture – whether Olympiad-level stamina can sustain hundreds of employees, or if it burns them out. Third, distribution – Windsurf integration and swyx’s framing give Cognition reach, but developers are not easy converts. They need trust, not just awe.

What are the risks? Compute costs remain heavy, long-horizon tasks brittle, and cultural intensity may narrow recruiting. Competitors with broader distribution can catch up quickly. The magic is not only in building Devins but in making them useful at scale.

And what is the opportunity? Think of it as a math paradise: multiplication tables where every line ends in a trillion. The prize is the global software labor force – tens of millions of developers, with annual spend counted in the trillions. To someone like Scott Wu, the numbers line up as neatly as a contest scoreboard: inputs, outputs, capture rates. Even a single-digit percentage of that market would justify the intensity that defines Cognition.

That mix – mathematical clarity, a culture of relentlessness, and a TAM so large it feels almost comic – is why Cognition matters. Whether they can cash it in is still an open problem. But for now, just as Wu once answered faster than anyone could finish reading the question, Cognition has written its solution on the scoreboard first.

Fascinating.

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