Cognition shares hard lessons from building cloud agents

The Cognition Team published a technical retrospective on what it took to build Devin as a production-grade cloud agent, cautioning enterprises that the path is far harder than posts like Stripe's make it appear. The post identifies three core failure modes of the naive "containerize a CLI agent" approach: shared-kernel security vulnerabilities, inability to survive async gaps in the software development lifecycle, and the orchestration complexity of running hundreds of concurrent sessions. Cognition's own solutions — microVM isolation built over a year of hypervisor engineering, and full machine-state snapshotting across memory, process trees, and filesystem — took longer to build than any other piece of infrastructure the team has produced. The post also notes that a leading cloud data platform company attempted to build this infrastructure internally and ultimately abandoned the project when scope overwhelmed their team.