Somewhere inside a large bank there is a codebase older than some of the engineers who look after it. It runs to millions of lines and thousands of files, much of it written by people who left years ago. Nobody alive knows all of it. Every change starts with days of archaeology, and the big jobs, a migration to a new language or a new version of a framework, sit on the roadmap for years because there are never enough people to do them.
That is the kind of place Devin was made for. It reads the code, writes down how the system fits together, and then does the work: one ticket, one migration, one pull request at a time, often many of them at once.
From a demo to a colleague#
Cognition introduced Devin on March 12, 2024, as the first AI software engineer. The company was founded by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan, three champion competitive programmers, and its launch video showed something new: an AI with its own shell, code editor and web browser, planning a task, writing the code, hitting an error, reading the logs and fixing it. On SWE-bench, a test built from real bugs in open-source projects, it solved 13.86 percent of a sample of issues. The best result before it had been 1.96 percent.
Devin became generally available in December 2024. Devin 2.0 followed in April 2025 with a cloud development environment, several Devins working in parallel and plans from $20 a month. In July 2025 Cognition acquired Windsurf, the AI code editor, along with its team and its enterprise customers, and in June 2026 Windsurf's editor returned as Devin Desktop.
Growth since then has been steep. Cognition says its annualized revenue run rate passed $1 billion in September 2026, the same month a Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel valued the company at $48 billion.
A computer of its own#
The idea at the heart of Devin is simple: give the AI the same tools a human engineer has, and let it use them on its own.
Essayer
