Cognition unveils Devin, the "world's first AI software engineer"

AI startup Cognition has unveiled “Devin,” an autonomous agent billed as the “world’s first AI software engineer.” Rather than being just a coding-assistance tool, it operates within a sandbox environment equipped with a shell, code editor, and browser, and is positioned as able to carry out development tasks from start to finish on its own.

Details

• Capabilities: Touted as able to learn unfamiliar technologies while building and deploying apps from scratch, fix bugs in existing codebases, train AI models, and contribute to production repositories
• Benchmark results: Claimed a score of 13.86% on SWE-bench, a benchmark measuring the ability to resolve real GitHub issues — dramatically higher than the previous best score of 1.96% at the time
• Funding background: Also revealed it had already raised $21 million in a Series A round led by Founders Fund
• Availability: Not publicly available at the time of announcement — offered as early access with capacity expanding gradually
• Reception: Drew major attention in the AI and software development communities, though the strength of the demos also sparked debate and controversy

What happened next

Initially limited to early access, Devin reached general availability (GA) that December as an enterprise plan starting at $500 per month. Cognition continued refining the model and expanding its features, further growing in scale after acquiring Windsurf in July 2025.