Cognition engineers describe daily life building Devin with Grant Sanderson
In a conversation with Grant Sanderson, Cognition engineers describe how working on Devin has shifted their day-to-day from local coding to managing multiple parallel autonomous agent sessions.
Score breakdown
Watch how Cognition's own engineers have restructured their workflows around Devin to understand the practical shift from AI-assisted coding to AI-delegated, human-reviewed software development at scale.
- 01Cognition engineers now start tasks with Devin rather than using AI inside local IDEs, a shift that occurred over roughly the past six months.
- 02Engineers manage multiple parallel Devin sessions simultaneously, with the human challenge being keeping track of all active sessions.
- 03One engineer said they no longer build features themselves — their role has shifted entirely to architecting and reviewing.
In a video published by Cognition, engineers behind the Devin autonomous coding agent spoke with Grant Sanderson about the realities of working at the frontier of AI software engineering. A central theme was how dramatically their own workflows have changed: engineers described a clear shift from using AI tools embedded in IDEs to delegating tasks directly to Devin and managing multiple parallel sessions simultaneously. One engineer said they have broken their day-to-day into "architecting features and building features" — and no longer build features at all, focusing instead on reviewing, testing, and steering Devin's output.
The conversation also touched on team culture and hiring philosophy.
The conversation also touched on team culture and hiring philosophy. Engineers described Cognition as a small, tight-knit team relative to the ambition of what they are building, with a family-oriented ethos that extends beyond work. A notable anecdote involved a young team member referred to as "Mog," who joined as an intern when the company was around 10 people. The team's conclusion from that experience was to "take a bet on extremely good people and let them surprise you." Grant Sanderson summarized the team's character as feeling like "a close-knit group of athletes training for the Olympics." The team also emphasized that aesthetic taste — the ability to create something beautiful, not just functional — is a quality they actively look for in new hires.
Key facts
- 01Cognition engineers now start tasks with Devin rather than using AI inside local IDEs, a shift that occurred over roughly the past six months.
- 02Engineers manage multiple parallel Devin sessions simultaneously, with the human challenge being keeping track of all active sessions.
- 03One engineer said they no longer build features themselves — their role has shifted entirely to architecting and reviewing.
- 04The company was described as around 10 people when they hired their first intern, referred to as 'Mog'.
- 05Cognition's hiring philosophy is described as 'take a bet on extremely good people and let them surprise you.'
- 06Grant Sanderson described the team as feeling like 'a close-knit group of athletes training for the Olympics.'
- 07Aesthetic taste — the ability to create something beautiful — is cited as a key quality Cognition looks for in new hires.