Lenny's Podcast · May 4Inside Devin: The AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code this year | Scott Wu
Started as hackathons in November 2023, became a company in January, launched in March 2024 and opened self-serve in December. It pivoted about eight times within coding agents, trains no models of its own, and 18 of its roughly 26 people had started companies before.
Tips
- Spend effort teaching the model real-world idiosyncrasies, not raising base intelligence▶ 1:04:00Cognition trains no models of its own, and no single model release was a night-and-day change for Devin.
- Fight to land the great hire, even if it means flying to meet their parents▶ 1:17:35The MIT hire has been on the team for over a year and Scott says they would not be here without him.
- Do the three to five basics of startups far more intensely than seems necessary▶ 1:16:4818 of the roughly 26 to 27 people on the team have started companies before.
- Pick a coding-specific domain where automated feedback loops make RL work▶ 12:30They began in late 2023 with an agentic loop for contest programming problems before the Devin idea emerged.
- Expect many pivots; even a clear thesis took eight within coding agents▶ 13:53Devin moved from a hackathon project to launch in March 2024 and self-serve in December 2024.
