Cognition engineers describe daily life building Devin with Grant Sanderson

Cognition engineers sat down with Grant Sanderson to discuss what it's actually like to build Devin, their autonomous software engineering agent. Engineers describe a significant shift in how they work: whereas six months ago many were using AI inside IDEs, the team now starts tasks with Devin and focuses on parallelizing work across multiple simultaneous sessions. One engineer noted they no longer build features themselves — their role has moved entirely to architecting and reviewing. The team culture is described as small, high-density, and family-like, with a strong emphasis on taste and aesthetic judgment alongside technical skill.