Scott Wu and Russell Kaplan are co-founders of Cognition

“And the simple way that I put this is that for us at Cognition, for example, our engineers don't type code anymore. Like, that's that's just reality. And this is within the last, yeah, three to six months, honestly, when the shift has really happened. You used to work with punch cards, for example, and now in many ways, the medium has shifted away from code, and a lot more of it has become basically English.”

“One of the fun stats actually is, today's March 9, and we actually, at this point, have already done more Devon sessions, in our customers in 2026 than we had in 2025. And so, basically, over the last, like, two months and change, we've already done more Devon, usage in total than than we had in all of 2025.”

“It's also, some comfort with non determinism. At Tesla, we had one mantra, which was, you know, never go to sleep while the GPUs are idling. If you let your cluster idle overnight, that's just a huge waste of resources. Just kick off some experiments before you go to bed. So you wake up, you get some more data and it's the same for all of software now. Like why would you go to sleep while the Devons are idling?”

“We're going to enter this, like, hyper deflationary cycle of software where it's it's so easy to build. It's so abundant. That doesn't mean that people are gonna stop producing software. They're actually gonna produce thousands of times more software. And so you're gonna have this total software abundance, but basically, any problem that's kind of solvable in the digital realm should just get solved in the digital realm.”

“Now we're kind of in this state of the world where the government spends a $100,000,000,000 a year on just IT modernization. We have huge amounts of government still written in COBOL, with people who, you know, have left or no longer understand how the code works. And it's really holding us back. And I mean, you feel it as a citizen day to day, think about your interaction with the DMV or trying to pay your taxes.”

“The earliest results that we where we saw them, we were like, oh, there's something here where they started with, basically, like, modernization programs. So people that had large legacy existing things they needed to transform. And if you sort of did the math, scope out how long it would take, maybe it would be like a two year project. And, you know, relatively quickly by, like, late twenty twenty four, we were measuring, somewhere between a six to 12 x productivity gain for those types of projects, meaning that one hour of human time spent managing Devon was worth like six to twelve hours of that human time doing the work themselves.”

“Either that or actually luxury might flip the other side because, artisanal handcrafted software is gonna be so rare. It's like, the early days of the industrial revolution was like, oh, great mechanized labor for goods. That was the higher status good. Of course the machines were more precise. And now it's totally flipped. If something's handmade that's obviously much higher status because it's so rare. This website was handmade. You can tell because of all the little bugs.”

“One of the stats that people talk about a lot is this METR report, which basically says for each different model that comes out, roughly how much human work can it do in an automated fashion before you have to go interrupt it. So just two or three years ago, the answer was, like, ten seconds or something. And at this point, it's already gotten to the point where it's in the scale of ten, twenty hours. The thing that's really crazy about the stat is you just see it very consistently double. For the last few years, it's doubled about four or five times every year.”

“I think there's gonna be an explosion in small businesses. I think AI is actually, like, an extremely small business enabling technology in particular where you think about what's hard about building or starting a small business. It's, you know, you don't have the resources of a large company that's specialization of labor in each part of the process. And I think AI, it's extraordinarily enabling. Think about the quality of quick legal gut check you can get from a chatbot, the quality of analysis of your financials, the quality of software that you build.”

“My favorite line on this is, our cofounder Walton says this, which is for so long, we've all been living in Minecraft survival mode, and now we're gonna be in creative mode. And I think that's really what we're gonna see over the next, honestly, the next five or ten years is getting to a point where you're really only limited to your ideas and to your imagination where you can kinda just turn things into reality, and I think that's gonna be a great future.”