Devon can write code, but also it can use all of the same tools that a human software engineer can use.
It's an AI engineer. We've been living in Minecraft survival mode for so long. Okay. And now we will be living in Minecraft creative mode.
And I really strongly believe this is really a game-changing technology for now in year 2040.
Yeah. Uh, what do you think the world will be like?
Hello everyone. Today we have a very, very special guest in our office, Mr. Scott Wu, co-founder and CEO of Cognition. Welcome, Scott.
Yeah, thanks to your company so much for having me. Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Thank you for spending your precious time to visit us today.
Yeah. He is, of course, a very famous innovator of Devon software. I was really shocked when I saw and used Devon. It's so cute. I call it Devon-chan. And, uh, you know, I asynchronously use 20 Devons in parallel.
And I got so many creativity.
Yeah, it's a really nice and amazing product. Thank you so much.
Oh, thank you so much. No, we also love our Devons as well, and it's nice, I think, to have our own, you know, basically little friend that helps with software.
Yeah, it works hard and very diligent, right?
We have a long, long way to go on a lot of projects.
First of all, yeah, please tell us about Devon. Yeah. Could you briefly explain what Devon can do to the audience?
Yeah. Yeah. So, so Devon is an AI software engineer. Um, and what that means is that Devon can write code, but also it can use all of the same tools that a human software engineer can use. And so, for example, um, it will be able to debug on its own. It can run shell commands. It can browse the web. It can read documentation. It can look at the logs. Um, and it needs to do all of this, of course, because, um, there really is so much more to software engineering than just writing code in a single file, right? And so Devon will, um, you know, you will hand Devon a task, um, for what you want it to do, um, and Devon will start working in parallel. And so as you mentioned, you can work with several Devons at once, um, but Devon will work on it, you know, in much the same way as a human engineer will, um, and you get to be your own manager of your own team of devs.
Yeah. So the key thing is it's an AI engineer. It's like a human engineer.
And we can just tell her or him what to do and he will do it asynchronously.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's exactly the idea. And I think as, um, you know, as time goes on and the capabilities get better and better, I think more and more of all of the work that we do, um, will be in this form. Um, and that's why we were really excited to build for this from the beginning.
Yeah. What is the key technology behind Devon to achieve this kind of automation?
Yeah. You know, one thing that we often say is that I think a lot of companies in AI are focused on code. We are very focused on coding. Yeah. And we are very focused on software engineering, which is a little bit different, right? And I think in the real world software is very messy. Um, and we've built Devon specifically for these use cases in big existing code bases, right? And commonly what you'll see is, um, obviously that there are lots of, um, you know, a massive code base with a lot of tickets and issues and maybe upgrades and refactors and modernizations that you have to do. Um, and handling those well requires a good iteration loop and a feedback loop. Um, and so a lot of it is, you know, teaching Devon how to use the tools to get to success, right? And if you hand Devon a bug, for example, and say, please fix this bug, then Devon will go and try to reproduce the bug. It'll test by itself. It'll go and do that. Um, and so I think in that way it is, um, it's a very, it's a bit of a different problem than solving for code specifically, which is solving for almost all the planning and decision-making of being a software engineer.
Mhm. So you're focusing on more difficult type of problems, right?
A different category, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And I really strongly believe this is really a game-changing technology.
So I really would like to know how Devon was born at the very beginning.
You created Cognition as a company.
And then started developing Devon, right?
And which one was first? You thought about Devon and created your company, or vice versa?
So Cognition was first, and we started around late 2023.
