Cognition Launches Devin, the First AI Software Engineer

US-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Cognition has launched Devin – the world’s first “fully autonomous” AI software engineer.

Leveraging the company’s long-term reasoning and planning technologies for AI, Devin can “plan and execute” complex engineering tasks “requiring thousands of decisions”. Devin can also recall relevant context at any step, learn over time, and fix mistakes.

Among Devin’s features are the ability to learn how to use unfamiliar technologies, build and deploy apps end to end, autonomously find and fix bugs, and train and fine-tune its own AI models.

The team at Cognition said it also gave Devin some real-life jobs via Upwork, which Devin was able to do.

The company has currently opened up early access to Devin and plans to ramp up its capacity going forward.

“Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review,” Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition, wrote in a company blog post.

“With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals.”

Wu added that they have also equipped Devin with developer tools, including the shell, code editor, and browser within a sandboxed compute environment.

“Finally, we’ve given Devin the ability to actively collaborate with the user. Devin reports on its progress in real time, accepts feedback, and works together with you through design choices as needed,” Wu added.

Cognition recently raised $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Founders Fund, with participation from a number of angel investors. The company has offices in New York and San Francisco Bay Area.