Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Our whole team is only like 15 engineers. We use a ton of Devon when we're building Devon. Most folks on the team are definitely working with up to five Devons at once. And so Devon merges like several hundred pull requests into production in the Devon codebases every month. What percentage of your PRs are Devon versus humans right now? It's in the neighborhood of a quarter or so. Where do you think this will be at the end of the year? Honestly, we expect it to be a decent bit more than half.

Starting point is 00:00:23 You guys are so ahead of how companies work with AI engineers. AI is going to be the biggest. technology shift of our lives. So most of the big tech revolutions that we've had over the last 50 years, like personal computer and the internet and mobile phone, they all had this big hardware component that was a big part of the distribution. Folks who were building for those industries kind of saw their market grow and grow and grow basically steadily year over year as the number of people with mobile phones increased, right? As the number of people connected to the internet increase. One of the things which is already, I'd say, different in AI is just how explosive the technology

Starting point is 00:00:56 can be. There's no weight on hardware distribution. It means that the speech, basis just growing so exponentially. How is it the act of being an engineer and building changing? I think there's going to be way more programmers and way more engineers a few years from now. Pretty quickly, the form factor of what it means to be a programmer, obviously, is going to change. But at the end of the day, of course, the discipline is all about just being able to tell your computer what's due.

Starting point is 00:01:14 And so in that lens, I really think that programming is only going to become more and more important as AI gets more powerful. Today, my guest is Scott Wu. Scott is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, which makes a product called Devin, the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. Unlike other AI tools that I've highlighted on this podcast, Devon is designed to act like an actual remote engineer that you chat with like you would with any other human engineer through Slack

Starting point is 00:01:38 or through its dedicated website. When Devin launched about a year ago, it was very much a junior engineer. Over the past year, they made a lot of progress, and Devin is now being used by tons of companies in production. We chat about how their engineering team of 15 uses Devens to build Devin, including how every engineer uses about five Devons each to help them code and move faster, how a quarter of their pull request today are committed by Devin's and that they expect this to be over 50% by the end of the year.

Starting point is 00:02:05 We also talk about how Scott imagines software engineering is going to look in the future and how the role of an engineer changes from a coder to an architect. We also get into the eight pivots that they went through before landing on this path, why Scott believes AI tools like this will lead to more engineer hiring versus less. Also where the name Devin comes from, and so much more, this episode is going to blow your mind. I highly recommend you listen to it if you're at all interested about where engineering, product building, and AI is going. A huge thank you to Claire Vo for suggesting a bunch of great questions for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting

Starting point is 00:02:41 app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of linear superhuman notion perplexity and granola. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Scott Wu. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions, from gong calls to Zendesk tickets, to Twitter threads, to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis.

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Starting point is 00:04:10 Brandon Fu, founder and CEO of Paragon. Hey, Brandon. Hey, Lenny. Thanks for having me. So integrations have become a big deal for AI products. Why is that? Integrations are mission-critical for AI for two reasons. First, AI products need contacts from their customers' business data,

Starting point is 00:04:28 such as Google Drive files, Slack messages, or CRM records. Second, for AI products to automate work on behalf of users, AI agents need to be able to take action across these different third-party tools. So where does Paragon fit into all this? Well, these integrations are a pain to build, and that's why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of months, across every use case, from rag data ingestion to agentic actions.

Starting point is 00:04:56 And I know from first-hand experience that maintenance is even harder than just building it for the first time. Exactly. We believe product teams should focus engineering efforts and competitive advantages, not integrations. That's why companies like U.com, AI21, and hundreds of others use Paragon to accelerate their integration strategy. If you want to avoid wasting months of engineering on integrations that your customer need, check out Paragon at useparagon.com slash Lenny. Scott, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me.

Starting point is 00:05:30 Excited to be on. I'm really excited to have you here because you are building and you've been building something that is very different from what a lot of other AI companies have been doing for a long time, although they are starting to converge to where you guys are now. We're going to talk about that. And it's also just such a unique point in the history of AI and just the journey of AI. And so it's really cool to be chatting right now. And I feel like we're going to chat again in a few years and be like, wow, we were so right about so much and so wrong about so much.

Starting point is 00:05:59 Yeah. And so I'm excited to have it here. Let's start with talking about Devin, giving people understanding just what the heck Devin is. This is the main product that you guys build. What is the simplest way to understand what is Devin? Absolutely. And so Devin is a fully autonomous software engineer that is going to work on tasks end-to-end. And so there are a lot of great tools for all parts of the stack of the AI code workflow.

Starting point is 00:06:19 So what Devin does is it is a full asynchronous workflow. And so you can tag Devin on an issue in Slack. You know, you're talking about an issue and you tag Devin. You can tag Devin in linear. You can have Devin. And Devin will make full requests in your GitHub. And so it's very much built to work with engineering teams as your junior engineer. Amazing.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Okay. So I remember when you guys launched this, there was like this big pitch of this is your new AI engineer. And it was really good at a lot of stuff. It wasn't great at other things. It's been a year now about since you guys. launched. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. What's the best way to think about like the level of seniority that engineer had back in the day when you guys launched and then the level of seniority of engineer

Starting point is 00:06:58 today, if that's, I don't know, measure of how to think about Devin. Yeah. And it's crazy to think about, by the way, because, you know, a year ago when we did the initial launch, I mean, people didn't really believe that an agent was possible. And it was a very, I mean, it was a very different time. You know, it's like start of 2024, you know, things with model capabilities were definitely quite a bit earlier on. Reasoning especially was quite a bit earlier on. And yeah, I mean, in the time since then, it's obviously developed a lot. I think in terms of practical skills, you know, there are some comparisons we make.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Sometimes we kind of say, well, when we got started, it was kind of like a high school CS student. And then as time went on and became more of like a college intern and now it's like a junior engineer. But I would say, though, that those are more like rough guidelines because I really like the phrase jagged intelligence, for example. Because there are, obviously, there are certain things that it is much better at than a human. There are certain things that are much worse at than a human. And I think over the last year, we've learned a lot, especially about not just coding agents, but agents in general are just like really building out, like, how all of us should be working and interacting with agents as part of our flow.

Starting point is 00:08:04 And so a lot of the things that we built, I mean, it's, you know, there was no Slack, there was no GitHub integration. There was no linear. There was no interactive planning phase working back and forth. There was no way to touch up Devon's code. And so a lot of the features that we've built on the product side since them have really been about basically, yeah, figuring out how to how to make working with Devon and handing off tasks to Devin as smooth an experience as possible. That's so interesting. So a lot of the work has gone not into how do we just make Devin the best possible engineer, but it's how to work with this new type of entity that we haven't ever worked with.

Starting point is 00:08:37 I think it's a 50-50 of both. You know, I think the capabilities obviously have improved a ton and we've seen these get better and get measurably better. But I think the other side of it is everything to do with, yeah, really the product interface and the tools and so on. And I think, you know, I think today folks generally know how to use chatbots and to work with chatbots, right? And that's an interface that people are familiar with. And obviously with agents, it's, you know, it's still like a real curve, I think, to learn how to use them and how to get the most out of them. And so it's really exciting to see a lot of others starting to build and do a lot more in the agent space as well. But I think this is the kind of thing that we're all really figuring out together as a space.

Starting point is 00:09:14 What can you share about just the scale of Devin at this point, whatever you're comfortable sharing? And then just where do you think the level of Devin's coding abilities will be in a year? So we work with companies of all stages and sizes. You know, on the smallest end, it goes to, you know, startups of just one or two people who are using Devin to build out a lot of their kind of like an initial prototype or initial product all the way up to, you know, big public companies, Fortune 100 companies or public banks or things like that who are using Devin like across their, across their engineering teams. In general, we've seen a huge range of the use cases there.

Starting point is 00:09:48 And obviously, the kinds of engineering work that you're doing at a one or two-person startup is very different from the kind of work that you're doing at a public bank. But throughout, it's all been basically, yeah, being that junior buddy of yours, that makes you go faster and really multiplies you, I would say. I think it can multiply you as an engineer, obviously, by just letting you work with your own team of Devons instead of having to be kind of fully synchronous on a single task. And then it's also kind of like multiplying your team and multiplying your team's knowledge base because Devin really accumulates a lot of the knowledge from

Starting point is 00:10:19 working with every member of your team and is able to bring that into each new session. Awesome. We're going to show people how it actually works later in the podcast. You're going to do a few live demos. But let's actually go to the beginning of the journey. What's just the origin story of Devin? How did this all begin? The founding team, I mean, most of us have known each other for years and years and years actually. And for almost everyone, this is our first time working together, but we've known each other a long time. And we all actually had our own kind of journeys in AI for the last decade or so. And so for myself, you know, I ran a company called this before this called Lunch Club, which was an AI for a professional networking product. And I ran that

Starting point is 00:10:55 for about five years. And, you know, my co-founder, one of my co-founder, Stephen was one of the first engineers at a company called Scale AI, which is obviously grown a lot and done very well. My other co-founder, Walden, was an early engineer at a company called Cursor, which is also obviously grown a lot and done really well. And our whole team kind of like was kind of like that. You know, many of us knew each other from, from competitive programming and math competitions, but we had stayed very closely in touch, you know, in the, decade since then. And we've all kind of all had our own journeys. And so, you know, we had, we had one person who was running teams at Nero. We had one person who was at Waymo, someone who had

Starting point is 00:11:27 their own YC tool startup for machine learning. And, and we were really excited to build something together. And this was around like late 2023, so about a year and a half ago at this point. And, yeah, when we got started, I mean, I think there were a couple of things that we felt really strongly about. And one was that reinforcement learning was really working and was going to be the next big paradigm shift in capabilities. You know, back then it was, you know, the initial chat GPT launch in 2022. And those models were to first order, were, you know, what we would call imitation learning in AI, right? Which is basically, you know, you have the model read all the texts that you can find on the internet and then train it to talk like somebody on the internet would talk, right? And there are kind of obviously a lot more details on top of that, but that's that's kind of the first order pass of what was really done.

Starting point is 00:12:15 And it was amazing, right? I mean, it passed a turning test. It was able to respond and to have encyclopedia knowledge about a lot of things. And I think this new paradigm, which we've gotten into over this last year or a year and a half, is really high compute RL, which is which is a very different paradigm, right? Which is basically the ability to go and do work on task and put something together and then be evaluated on whether that was correct or incorrect and use that knowledge. to decide what to do and to learn from that, right? And so, you know, we felt very strongly that that was going to happen. I think it's for us is code was the natural thing to work on for a couple reasons.

Starting point is 00:12:50 One, because, you know, we're all programmer nerds ourselves. And so teaching AI to code is about as cool as it gets for us. But also because, you know, code has this whole automated feedback loop, right, where you can run the code. And that is the kind of automated feedback that really feeds into the RL, which makes these models so great at coding. And then the other thing that we felt very strongly about was that the product experience was going to shift from, you know, what I'll call like text completion to agents,

Starting point is 00:13:14 basically, right? And to first order, I would kind of say, you know, there have been a lot of great experiences in text completion. You know, it's been used for marketing. It's been used for customer support. It's been used for education and in code, obviously, as well as, you know, the GitHub co-pilot was kind of really the dominant product of that initial wave, right? But I think that the big shift that we really felt we would see is moving from kind of this text-to-text model to an actual autonomous system that can make decisions, that can interact with the real world, that can take in feedback, that can iterate and take multiple steps to solve problems. And now we call that agents, but that was what we were really excited about at the time. So it was always coding. It was always agents.

Starting point is 00:13:57 And in some ways that kind of feels like it should have been, you know, like been clear from the start. But even with that, I feel like we've pivoted like eight times or something within coding agents, you know, over the last year and a half. I just noticed recently all the AI, top AI companies, sort of not all, but many of them, the product that is winning is different, has a different name from the company, which is not typical. Cursors, any sphere, bolt, the stack splits. You guys are cognition labs, like VZero's for sale. And it just tells me, like, these all emerge later in the company's journey and they tried a bunch of stuff and like, oh, wow, this thing worked. And it's so interesting that it's so common amongst these topics. Yeah, I mean, OpenAI, chat, GPT, Anthropic, and Cloud and Google.

Starting point is 00:14:38 Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So, you know, when we got started, it wasn't even really a company. I mean, it's more like a project or a hackathon almost. You know, we got a bunch of, we booked an Airbnb basically for a couple weeks as it was around Thanksgiving time and just got a bunch of people together who were just excited to hack on some projects and build something cool. And it's funny, actually, the first thing that we were building for, actually,

Starting point is 00:15:01 was more like solving these more like contest programming problems and using like an agenic loop to really do better on that. And so obviously, if you run your code on the test cases, you can evaluate, you know, there's a lot of agenic work that you can do there to try and do better. And that we spent some time on that initially. And then, you know, we've kind of gone from, I mean, the story of the whole company for us in some sense has been going from hacker house to hacker house, you know. So after that, you know, we had another hacker house.

Starting point is 00:15:28 And that's where kind of some of the initial ideas for Devon came. and really building like a software engineering agent and not just like a coding agent and having it interact with a lot of these tools. But even then there were so many iterations. And even like the idea of talking to Devon, for example, was like, you know, it was something that we had to come up with. Initially it was just like you hand off a task and then it works and then it shows you like this whole finished code. Right. And now obviously it's like you can jump in at any time. You can get feedback on the plan.

Starting point is 00:15:54 You guys can scope out the task together, you know, when you're working with Devon. And a lot of these things we had to develop obviously. And certainly we've learned a lot about use cases, the form factor. We've made a lot of big improvements and step function improvements on the capabilities and Devon's ability to use tools and debug and make decisions. And so it's, yeah, it's been a fun journey. I mean, I think, like, I would say that the grounding question for us, really, which is one that we think about all the time, is really just like,

Starting point is 00:16:21 what is the future of software engineering? You know, and how should we be working with AI to write code? Because I think at the end of the day, of course, that's what, lines, all of the product decisions that we make. I like that you're asking the juicy question I wanted to get to. Before I ask it, just for the history books, when did you guys start kind of hacking around and when did Devin launch? How long was that period?

Starting point is 00:16:44 Yeah. So we started in November of 2023, which was a, yeah, just like hackathon mode. We officially made it into a company around the start of 2024. And then our initial launch was in March. And so it was like non-stop. I mean, it's been non-stop for the entire last, you know, 17 months. But, you know, it's getting to the launch and then obviously working with enterprises and developing the product a lot more, building in, building it and getting it to work for a lot of

Starting point is 00:17:11 practical use cases. And then doing, you know, making it fully available self-serve in December of last year. And now we've rolled out 2.0, obviously just a few weeks ago. And so it's been a very busy time for us. Understatement of the century. Let me ask this question because you touch on a bit, this whole idea of Devin as a person. and this idea of creating a personality for Devin, it's unlike any other, I believe, AI app. No one else has like a name and like a, you don't think of it as a person. What made you guys decide to go to that approach and just how do you design it to work well that way? I would say it's a decision we're pretty proud of, I would say.

Starting point is 00:17:46 I mean, I think there's a lot of different product experiences out there. And I think the thing that really makes Devin unique in what it does is that you can really hand off. And more and more what we've seen, honestly, is that, that, I think a lot of explaining that the Devon experience to folks is really just explaining to it. Explain it as, yeah, this is your junior buddy. And that goes for a lot of the parts of the flow where in the onboarding, for example, initially I would say, like, we've definitely had a lot of users come in and just kind of see the blank screen and not really know. Or they'd ask, hey, like, I'm going to do this whole big re-architecture, the whole code base.

Starting point is 00:18:21 And basically, you know, what we've learned over time is to basically get folks to think more like, well, well, you know, let's work on getting the repository set up first. Like, let's make sure we hand Devin a couple one-pointer tasks so it can get familiar with the code base. You know, let's get it the thing. If Devin needs to be able to test the code or run the Linter or CI or things like that, obviously we want to make sure Devin's got its own virtual machine set up to be able to do that. And similarly, like, I think the usage pattern, you know, I think often it wasn't clear. And obviously you can sit and just kind of watch Devin do it action by action and work that way.

Starting point is 00:18:55 But we found that the best workflow, really, as a team building a lot of stuff, was to work with multiple Devons and to run them asynchronously and to kick them off and to only jump in, basically, as you needed to provide feedback or steer the plan or anything like that. And so in many ways, I think it's, I think Devon, as a name really is our attempt to kind of capture the soul of that as a product, where it really is, you know, treating it like a bit more of an autonomous entity that you can hand off tasks. that you can work with, that you should be teaching and learning with over time.

Starting point is 00:19:28 I want to come back to an area you started us down and then I took us away from, which is impact on software engineering and then how software engineering is going to change. So there's kind of two parts of this. Just like when people are using Devon today, say in the like this year, how is it the act of being an engineer and building changing for those companies? What does that look like? You know, by the way, we're all software engineers ourselves. You know, it's like I'm a programmer by training and still a programmer at heart, certainly.

Starting point is 00:19:55 And, you know, I think the way that we have always thought about it is there's layers of abstraction and there's tools. And one way I would say at a high level is kind of, you know, I think of AI in general as, yeah, I mean, computers are obviously getting more and more intelligence and are able to do more and more. And, you know, it's possible there may come a day where computers truly do everything that we do and humans are not responsible for any of it. You know, I don't expect that to come particularly soon. But I guess what I would say is, you know, until that point for as long as we're still part of the equation, one of the most important things to do, obviously, is, you know, for us as humans is to instruct our computers on what we want and what we want to build and what we want to do, right?

Starting point is 00:20:37 And software engineering is, you know, we think of it today, obviously, as Python and C++ and JavaScript and all these things. But at the end of the day, of course, the discipline is all about just being able to tell your computer what's due. And so in that lens, I really think that programming is, if anything, is only going to become more and more important as AI gets more powerful. And I think the thing that's really, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, iterative transformation. And so you asked how, what things look like today. And I would say, yeah,

Starting point is 00:21:07 it's, it really is like having, like, a junior buddy, or really a team of junior buddies that you can work with, right? And so every engineer on our team, you know, we use a ton of devon when we're building devon. And so devon merges, like, several hundred pull requests into production in the Devon codebases every month, you know, which is, I mean, our whole team is only like 15 engineers. And so it's a pretty sizable fraction of all the code that we write. And the way that we use it is basically, yeah, everyone's got their whole team of Devon's. You know, if you're going to be like looking through various issues, if you're going through feature requests, if you're going through bugs, if you're going through new paradigms that you want

Starting point is 00:21:39 to build, then it is naturally the case that there's a lot of handoff points where you just say, hey, at Devon, here's what's going on. Can you please take a pass at this, right? And sometimes Devon will be able to do the task 100% autonomously and just makes the PR and then you merge the PR and that's great. Sometimes you want to be able to jump in for the 10 or 20% that really needs your help. Maybe there's a few details with how exactly you want to scope it or how you're architecting this feature. Or maybe you want to go and test the front end at the end yourself to make sure it looks exactly the way that you want and give your one or two lines of feedback after that. But a lot of it is really, yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, learning to work with Devon to be able to just,

Starting point is 00:22:18 do more in parallel and build more. What percentage of your PRs are Devin versus humans right now? Yeah, I'd have to look, but it's in the neighborhood of a quarter or so of all of our us. Yeah, yeah. And then what was it like six months ago? Oh, yeah, it's grown a ton for, I mean, we've seen it growing exponentially internally ourselves as well.

Starting point is 00:22:39 And so it's, you know, it's kind of an interesting one where, again, it's always both the capabilities in the product interface. And so, you know, I think the intelligence has increased a lot. But the other thing, of course, is that, you know, we've spent a lot of time in figuring out how to build and to really kind of build for an interface where you can get Devin's value on tasks where Devin is able to do the 80 or 90%. So Devin is obviously not, you know, it's obviously not perfect and it'll make mistakes and so on. And a lot of the question is basically, yeah, how do you scope out your initial task with Devin and then just kind of set Devin off and have it go and do the things that you want to do? You know, how do you come in at the end and review and give feedback? How do you make sure Devin learns over time?

Starting point is 00:23:19 How are you able to kind of just check in as needed and course correct if you want to? Okay. So today about quarter of your PRs are Devin's. Where do you think this will be at the end of the year? What would you guess? I think by the end of this year, we expect it to be more than half. And I mean, as time goes on, you know, one of the things that we've seen is just you're able to do more and more and more asynchronously, right? And you're able to hand off more and more.

Starting point is 00:23:44 You know, I think the soul of programming and the soul of software engineering has really been about, through all the areas, you know, not just now, but, you know, even when it was assembly, right? And even when it was Pascal and even when it was punch cards or whatever. I think the soul of it has really been basically just about defining the problem that you're facing and really thinking through exactly what is the solution that you want to build, you know, thinking through the architecture, thinking through the details and really kind of mapping out in your mind exactly what you want to build, basically, and what you want. and what you want to have your computer do. And I think that's what makes software engineering really great. And I think that's like the funnest part of software engineering. I think at the same time, that's probably, you know, in the neighborhood of 10% of the average software engineer's time, right?

Starting point is 00:24:28 Because 90% of the time is, you know, you've got this Kubernetes error that you've got to debug and you have to see what went wrong and the system crash or, you know, you let some port open and this is, you know, messing up or, you know, there's a bug report that you have to take care of or you've got to migrate your code or you've got to upgrade to a new version or things like that. You know, a lot more kind of like implementation. And one of the ways that we've kind of thought about Devin and building Devin is really allowing engineers to go from Brick later to architect, so to speak.

Starting point is 00:24:58 And a lot of it is, yeah, just like getting to the point where you can do the high-level directing and you can basically specify things exactly how you want. You know, I think it is very much about still having the human in control and having the human able to do the full specification, but just multiplying the magic. of what you can do and what you can build, you know, in one day or what hour or however long. So in the future, say someone is trying to get into software engineering, thinking about becoming an engineer. First of all, do you think people should, you know, classic question, everyone's getting these days, should you still learn to code?

Starting point is 00:25:29 So that's just, I'd love your perspective there. And then two, four people that are engineers today, what skills do you think will be more and more important and then less important in this discussion of moving from bricklayer to architect? Yeah, for sure. I love this question. First of all, the question of whether you should still learn the code, my answer would be absolutely yes. I think to a large extent, you know, computer science, when you take computer science classes and when you learn these fundamentals, sure, you're learning a little bit about, you know, how a particular language is syntax works or something

Starting point is 00:25:57 like that. But honestly, most of what you're learning really is about the ability to logically break down problems for number one. And two, I would say, is just, yeah, the model of a computer and a lot of these decisions and a lot of the abstractions that we've built over time, right? Like, what is a database and how should you think about a database? You know, what is a garbage collection system and how do those work? And all of these different pieces. And the reason I think that's important is because it's the same with a lot of these other, you know, arguably we've already kind of gone through these phases in programming.

Starting point is 00:26:28 And I think this next one is going to be, you know, somewhat faster and somewhat bigger. But in many ways a similar flavor, which is, you know, when you work with Python today, obviously, a lot of things are already abstracted away from you. And in some sense, you know, someone from 50 years, might already call Python, you know, you just get to explain in English what you want, and now the computer does it for you, right? And that's great. And I think it's really powerful. It's opened it up. I mean, we have far more programmers, obviously, than we ever have before because of that. But I would say, certainly, you know, as you're building your skills as an engineer,

Starting point is 00:26:59 it really helps a lot to understand the distractions and to be able to peel the layers beneath, right? And so, you know, folks will use assembly, for example, if they're really performance optimizing a piece of code. But also, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, in order to build good systems and to understand these things, you certainly want to understand these abstractions of how does networking work? What is TCPIP exactly? Or what happens with this Python code when it gets interpreted or all of these details? And I think similarly, I think we will get to a state where, yeah,

Starting point is 00:27:28 with no experience at all, you're going to be able to build some pretty cool stuff and to do some pretty amazing work just by explaining what it is that you want. But I think that for quite some time, you really want to be able to think precisely about details, to peel back the abstractions, to be very, very, very precise about what it is that you want to build and how. And then for skills that you think are more and more valuable for engineers, like, where should engineers today be leaning more and more into and versus like, you know, forget and forget this?

Starting point is 00:27:58 I don't need to think about this anymore. For sure. And I think architect, I mean, it's, you know, we already have a term for architect and engineering. And I think it is directly, directionally, the right turn. And I think a lot of it is really, you know, it's, I think one thing. thing to kind of just do a routine implementation and write boilerplate code and things like that. And I would say that, you know, in many ways, AI coding has already made us much faster at that,

Starting point is 00:28:20 right? But I think a lot of the core questions of understanding very complex systems and working in the context of the whole company and thinking about, you know, the product that you're building or the work that you're doing and understanding, okay, what are the problems that we want to solve? How do we want to solve those problems? What is exactly the solution that we want to build? What are all these key decisions and tradeoffs that we're going to be making? Basically, I think folks who are able to do that really, really well are just going to be able to leverage themselves more and more. And so if anything, I think there's going to be, I think there's going to be way more programmers and way more engineers, you know, a few years from now than there are today. And I think pretty quickly, the form factor of what it means to be a programmer obviously is going to change.

Starting point is 00:28:57 In some sense, it already has. But I think there's just going to be so much more for us to build. You know, I think one of the great things, folks talk about Jeffins paradox all the time. I mean, software is truly the kind of, you kind of. the shining example of Jevon's Paradox, where we have always managed as a society to find more and more things that we want to build software for and build more code for it. And I really think there's a lot more out there to do. For people that don't know Jevons Paradox, can you briefly explain it? Absolutely. Yeah. So Jevins Paradox just says that as the price of something

Starting point is 00:29:30 goes down, it can still be the case that the total spend on it actually goes up. And so, you know, you can think about this with money. You can think about this with time or resources, but the direct version here is, I think, as it becomes easier and easier to program, and as programming becomes more and more effective, I think we're going to have a lot more programmers. You know, it's, I think in a kind of zero-sum view, you might say, well, we're going to be, we're going to be 10 times faster at software engineering. And so it means that we're going to need 10 times fewer software engineers, right?

Starting point is 00:29:59 But I think in practice, what really is going to happen is actually we're going to build even more than 10 times as much code. And because, you know, all of the work that we do is so capped, obviously, on, our ability to actually build and execute and iterate. We're going to have so many great ideas out there. We're going to have so many great products out there. People are going to build a lot more personalized experiences, for example, and there's going to be a lot to do.

Starting point is 00:30:22 Going back to the way you guys use Devon, so you said that every engineer has kind of this fleet of Devons. How many Devons per engineer do you find most people are working with these days at your company? Yeah, so it's very asynchronous. And so obviously you can kick them up and start them up and shut them down, basically as you see fit. But most folks on the team are definitely, yeah, are often working with up to five Devons at once, I would say.

Starting point is 00:30:46 And it's a nice flow where it's, you know, you think through, all right, what are the five things that we want to get done today? One, two, three, four, five. You have Devon one, do number one. You have Devon two, do number two, devon three. And the thing about it is a lot of it is, and for what it's worth, you know, I think it's taken us some time to really kind of like to adjust to it

Starting point is 00:31:04 and get to the point where it's really intuitive for us. But I think it's, yeah, it's definitely a different experience where you're handing off most things asynchronously. And the goal for each of your tasks is to be there for the parts that really need your expertise, where either you really, really need to define exactly what it is that you're solving for and what you're building, or maybe some of the more complex parts where you want to steer Devon towards, you know, particularly what kinds of changes you want to make. You know, I want the class to be set up this way. And I want, you know, we should go and change all the downstream reference.

Starting point is 00:31:37 to this as well or whatever, but basically having Devon do the bulk of the work asynchronously with you. And then how many engineers do you guys have roughly? Yeah, so our engineering team today is about 15 people. 15, 15, 15.15. 15. One five. One five.

Starting point is 00:31:50 Yeah. Holy moly. Okay. And then each one has five-ish devons. Yeah. So there's five times a number of Devons as engineers. What I love about this is, this is just like a glimpse into where the future is going. You guys are so ahead of how companies work with AI engineers.

Starting point is 00:32:06 And so seeing how you operate. is going to be, it's a sense, essentially how most companies will end up operating. Yeah, and for what it's worth, you know, we've already seen this shift, I'd say, ourselves, where it's, in terms of the team, obviously, it's, you know, folks don't spend that much of their time just writing out boilerplate or just kind of doing pure, like, implementation of features. And people get to spend, like, much more of their time focused on really just, yeah, thinking about the core questions of, yeah, how do we make Devin better? What is the right interface for Devin?

Starting point is 00:32:36 And what is the right flow or the right set of features that's really going to make this as great of an experience as possible? And that's how we like things. When is the point you reach where there's takeoff of this being the bif? You know, like your Devin starts moving so much further ahead of everyone else. Like once you haven't enough Devons doing all these things, they're just like, or in your 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 100 years ahead. Honestly, I think as a community, you know, I think the kind of all of us as engineers around

Starting point is 00:33:05 the world that I think we're going to have to think about this and build for this and kind of adapt to these new technologies. But what I would say is, yeah, I think more and more, and especially as capabilities get better, but certainly, you know, even in study to say today, I think, you know, I think more and more I think things are going to shift towards this kind of asynchronous flow. And one of the reasons I would say for that is in the real world, you're just cats by real world constraints, right? And I think that one way to put it is kind of like, and don't take these numbers exactly, but, but, you know, it's kind of like the first order math of it is, of course, you know, being able to write files or to complete this function or complete this line or things

Starting point is 00:33:43 like that, you know, it helps a ton and so it's a really great experience, right? There's a lot of parts of building software that obviously are almost not that at all, right? It's, you know, you have a bug that you're trying to fix. And so you, you spin up the local server, you click around on your own products on the front end and try to reproduce the bug yourself, you know, once you have the error, you take a look at Datadog and you see what happens. and you try to find other errors in the logs. You know, you look at those files and you see what went wrong. You make some edits.

Starting point is 00:34:11 Maybe you go and like rerun the whole process again now that you, you know, to make sure your change looks right, right? And that's a lot of, you know, what it means to be a software engineer, right? And, you know, these are processes that take real time. I think we're going to shift more and more towards this agentic workflow because, you know, that's in some ways it's kind of like the way to really get to that, you know, 200%, 500%, 500%, a thousand percent gains that that that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, we'll be getting to with software engineering over the next few years.

Starting point is 00:34:38 Okay, enough talk. Let's show people what the heck this actually looks like. Let's do it. You've got a couple demos prep that show a few use cases that you found helpful. Yeah. So you're going to pull up your screen and then it will kick it off and then we'll talk as it's happening. And so the whole process, obviously, of working with Devin is working asynchronously. And so I thought it'd be cool for us to actually just watch Devin a little bit in action.

Starting point is 00:35:02 And then, you know, we can go through some other examples of work that, Devon's done or things that Devon does for us, even on our team, for example, but, but, but then we can check back and asynchronously with our, with our Devon after. So I'll share this real quick. And the, the key thing, you know, that I would just emphasize here is a lot of it, obviously, is really just about, yeah, thinking about as a software engineer or as engineers ourselves or engineering teams, engineering teams, PMs, and so on, you know, what are the, what are the things that we would want to build that we would run hand off?

Starting point is 00:35:33 And so, you know, we have Devon set up with our own Devon codebase, for example. And so I'll go ahead and kick off at Devon for that. And so I'll just say, hey, add Devon. I'm on with my friend, Lenny. Hi, Devin. Can you modify Devin web app to, let's feature your newsletter as part of the Devon? Let's do it. Like on the real Devon website.

Starting point is 00:36:02 Reacher, Lenny's site. Lose all your users. And so we're going to kick this off. As you can see, Devon gets started instantly and goes ahead and respond. And again, you can work with this asynchronously. You can work with it synchronously as well. For this, we'll just kind of go in a little bit and see exactly what's going on. But as you can see here, Devon's going through files and taking a look through a lot of stuff.

Starting point is 00:36:24 And so we can follow here basically as we need to and see what makes sense. You can see Devon's already called out a few particular pieces, right? where there's the sidebar, which we have implemented on the front end, and there's pieces there, and we're going to have a new component, and that component's going to link to Lenny's website. That all sounds good. Devin's asking us any questions if there's anything that we have here. Same story here where you can let Devin make its own decisions and handoff,

Starting point is 00:36:51 or you can go in and be kind of give some more thoughts. Should the button open in a new tab or within the application, I'll say let's open it in a new tab. And you could answer these at any point? Like, is it waiting for your answer? You can answer these at any point. You can hand off, hand back off. But it's not going to be like, just God damn it. I just wrote it this way. Why didn't you tell me earlier? That's right. Yeah, one of the main one of the big pieces, you know, with Devin is, Devin will always be enthusiastic. You know, we'll always be ready to put in the hours.

Starting point is 00:37:19 Thanks for changing scope. Thanks, guys. And so we'll give Devin a chance to work, and it's going to go through these files, and it'll make a pull request for us, and we'll see it and go from there, but I thought it would be fun to show some other examples of Devin in action as well. One of the examples, actually this morning, which I just used Devin for, is I asked Devin to help me brush my own facts up for this podcast. And so obviously a huge fan of the podcast and the newsletter. I asked Devin, hey, Devin, I'm going to be on the podcast. Could you please research everything you can about him and make a nice website quiz for me so that I can make sure I know my facts, right? And so Devin, this was just this morning, I asked him to do this and I'll kind of just show what Devin did.

Starting point is 00:38:03 It looks like. Yeah, went to Wikipedia first. Unfortunately, it's not a page on Wikipedia, which is, Lenny, we'll work on that. I guess. Not big enough deal yet. They did you dirty. I mean, we need that. We need a patron.

Starting point is 00:38:15 And so then, you know, then it went and found it on Spotify. So you're watching what it's researching live. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is, this was this morning, obviously. And this is a playback of what Devin did. This is part of Devin. You could just watch what it did. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:38:30 And so, you know, especially when you're building engineering projects or something like that, you can see kind of like each of the steps that Devin was doing. Or if Devin tested the code locally, obviously, you want to be able to go and look and see, you know, what Devin was cooking around with and testing or things like that. So it found the newsletter. It's going and looking at this, right? And it's going and reading all of this. And then it says, okay, let's get started with putting the code together, right?

Starting point is 00:38:53 And so it says, hey, I've researched, you know, it's going through and writing all this, putting an app together. It plays its own quiz itself, actually, which we should just, we should just play this quiz. Actually, let's, let's see, let's see how much I know. What is the name? What is the name of the podcast? Lenny's podcast. Let's, for people not watching, so to say, approximately how many subscribers, a million, very good. Yeah, yeah. What is, what are three main topics Lenny's focus on? Oh, product growth and career. Very good. It's a good quiz. It's a lot of What does Lenny's do besides podcasting? I'd say writing, angel investing and advising.

Starting point is 00:39:33 How often does Lenny publish? Once a week, right? And so, yeah, so we can go through all these and do all these. And I took this quiz, by the way, obviously, to make sure that I was well prepped. But yeah, this is kind of one of the more fun examples, obviously, of just like. Scott, how many subscribers do I have at my newsletter? Over a million, actually. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:53 And then one last one I'll show. and then maybe we can come back to our initial run after. But is, like I was saying, like a lot of this is really built to work with all of the existing code workflows out there. And so, you know, for example, we were doing some exploration with the DeepSeek repository on GitHub.

Starting point is 00:40:11 And we imported it into Devon and we got our own fork of it set up in Devon. And a couple of things I just wanted to show here. You know, one is Devon sets up its whole wiki with all of its internal understanding. And so when Devon indexes the code base, obviously building a representation of the code and learning it and improving it over time is one of the big things that Devin does.

Starting point is 00:40:30 And funnily enough, we found that naturally humans really are interested to understand this code-based representation as well. And so, you know, Devin Wiki is something that we built here, and you can take a look at all of these different pieces and see each of these different things. Here are the FP8 operations. You know, here's an SG-Lang integration. There's diagrams of how the different layers are built and put together. There's, you know, deployment operations.

Starting point is 00:40:51 There's a lot of details about the architecture as well. And you can ask questions about it as well. And so, for example, you can say, how does Deepseek handle multi-token prediction design for spec deck? And it'll go through and it's able to kind of search through the entire code base and give you an informed answer based off of that. And so we use this a lot. And it helps when you're when you're scoping out a task for Devon and doing an initial prompt. It also helps obviously just in a vacuum. Like you often have questions about your code base that are really nice, right?

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Starting point is 00:42:36 How should people think about what kind of code base Devon can plug into? Yeah, yeah. So we go all the way to the biggest code base as possible, right? And one way I'd kind of put it is, you know, how the way that that we as engineers, would think about a large code basis. Certainly, when you're making changes or when you're thinking about a particular task, you're not bringing in every single line of the code base at once, right?

Starting point is 00:43:00 You have a high level abstraction that you're able to think about and look into, right? And then you're obviously able to zoom in and get to kind of higher resolution on each of these different things, right? And so Devin works in much the same way, where the first thing it'll do is it's going to kind of figure out like the high level architecture of what's going on here and what this is built for and so on.

Starting point is 00:43:21 But within each of the components, it's obviously also going to be able to zoom in and give some more detail about each of these. And so here's FP8 to B-Float 16 and how exactly a lot of that is set up, right? Here's each of the different parts of the code base. And so similarly, we've built this to be scalable. It's essentially coming back to the engineer as architect

Starting point is 00:43:41 is now it's helping you understand the architecture. Yeah. It's kind of circling back to that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And one of the fun use cases that we've seen, actually with folks is they'll often actually use Devin, get Devin's help to onboard new engineers on the team, right? And, you know, when you're new and you're joining, there's obviously a lot of questions that you have about the code base or about how things are set up. It also sometimes can be

Starting point is 00:44:02 a little bit awkward to, you know, to ask your mentor or your manager to the questions. And if you're worried that they're going to be really dumb questions, right? And so it's nice to just be able to ask Devin and to go through Devin's Wiki and to understand these internal representations, right? I think that's really interesting because it comes back to your point that Devin is not just a junior engineer, what you call a jagged, a jagged engineer? A jagged intelligence. Jagged intelligence where it's almost like a staff engineer at understanding the code base. Usually you have to ask an engineer that's been there a long time, what does this do?

Starting point is 00:44:30 Where's this thing? How does this work? And it feels like Devin's very good at that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, in the retrieval and kind of processing a lot of code and a lot of tokens at once is, you know, something that language models are really great at, right? And so basically being able to get those gains and the places that you need them is really great.

Starting point is 00:44:48 Yeah. Sweet. All right. You got a couple more use. Yeah. One last flow of shows. We just rolled this out last week, actually, but it's a full kind of Devon automation set up with linear. And so, you know, if you have tasks that you're doing on the DeepSeek repository, for example, and it's all set up, all you have to do is you just add the Devon label. And Devin will come through and it'll give you this, right? And it's going to give you its thoughts on what the tasks looks like. And, you know, you can take a look at each of the particular files that you see or it'll point out snippets that it thinks are important.

Starting point is 00:45:18 And from there, if you feel good about what was built or the conclusions that we came to, then you can just start off at Devon session that will go and actually do that work. That is insane. Like, that sounds like such a simple idea. But essentially what you're saying is there are tasks in linear that are fixes and features. And now Devin just goes off and can just do them for you. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:44 And so it's definitely like it's a hands-on process. You know, you certainly want to be involved when Devin is scoping out the task or giving you its thoughts. And the nice thing, too, by the way, is Devin will give you its confidence level. And, you know, here's how likely I think I am to really understand this piece or that piece or whatever. But it helps make things a lot faster, right? And to your point, you know, it's like a lot of product managers, for example, obviously I love to be able to use Devin and Linear to understand things better, the code base better or things like that. And Claire Vo, for example, from LaunchDarkly is a big Devon user.

Starting point is 00:46:20 And she loves basically going and scoping out tasks or asking data questions or asking, hey, what's going on? Or is this merged into production yet? Or is this a feature flag right now? Or what percent of people are getting this or that feature? It's a clean way, basically, to make that intelligence much more accessible. I love just like with the integration with linear that you can still keep it really simple. You know, you add a little ticket like, hey, this link to this homepage with do this.

Starting point is 00:46:48 And Devin will be really good at understanding what you mean and then show you. Here's what I'm thinking. Is this right? Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So, yeah, so Devin did finish working.

Starting point is 00:46:57 It seems like there's something going on with the CI and it's debugging that right now. But it went ahead and put up the initial first past pull request and we can take a look. And it's, uh, this is the Devon website, obviously in, in this custom deploy. And we have Lenny's newsletter right here. Let's ship this to production. Let's go. I'll be so confused. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:15 That's amazing. Okay, show it again real quick. So just added it to the homepage of Devin's Yeah, yeah. Devin obviously has access to our Devin code base. It does a lot here, and so it's super familiar with all the pieces here. Beautiful. And it's that, yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:29 I like how that looks. We've got Devin Search. We got Devin Wiki. And we've got Lenny's newsletter. Drive some great growth. I'll link to your site. You link to my site. We'll get some page rank going.

Starting point is 00:47:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Is that a good example? Oh, there it is. What a beautiful. website, Hermione's letter. Is that just like a good example of the kind of thing Devin is very good at? Like, here is a very specific thing to change on the website. How does your people think about what Devin is very good at and maybe where it starts to fall apart? You know, the way that

Starting point is 00:47:55 we often describe it is, I think Devin is best when it is working on tasks that are well-defined. You know, it's one way to put it is you want to be giving Devin tasks, not problems, right? And a lot of these things, you know, like what you just saw, which was kind of like a quick front-hand feature request or a bug fix or adding testing and documentation or things like that. You know, one of the things that that makes a loop really nice, obviously, is a quick way to iterate and test. And so with something like this, obviously, super easy for us, for example, to just go pull up the preview and see that the link works, right?

Starting point is 00:48:28 Obviously, it would be easy for Devin to do as well. Devin will often go and log into Devin and start a Devon session and make sure it's, you know, when it's working on our own code base, which is kind of hilarious. But yeah, you generally want something that is kind of like easy to verify and easy to test is the main thing. And you can work on bigger projects or bigger asks as well, obviously. But in that case, you should certainly expect to need to steer Devin Moore to make sure you're really, you know, to make sure it's going the right direction. It's interesting because that's very similar to the way people talk about synthetic data and reinforcement learning, creating data. That's very easy.

Starting point is 00:49:01 There's like a very definitive answer yes and no. Yeah. And it's very clear. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let me ask you this question. What's something that you guys debated a lot as you were just designing and building Devon? I'll give a couple that comes to mind. One I would say is, yeah, a question of, I'll call it like how opinionated we should be.

Starting point is 00:49:23 You know, we had the workflows that we used to Devon for, which was very much, as you can see, for, you know, basically integrating to our Slack and GitHub, making pool requests for us in our repos, responding to issue reports or things like that. And nationally, we've had certainly a lot of other, you know, kind of different things that have come up that folks have tried. I mean, we have folks who like order their door dash with Devon, for example, even. We have folks who certainly, you know, a lot of people who are kind of building cool, cool websites from scratch or working on things like that. And yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting tradeoff for us where I think the way that I would describe it is, you know, in our products. Certainly, you know, the large bulk of the features that we build are for this kind of like, you know, making pull requests and engineering teams use case. But I think, uh, basically our, kind of general stance with the other is obviously if folks want to use Devon for that, that's great.

Starting point is 00:50:14 And we want to just kind of make sure that they're, they're fully aware about the limitations and about where things get cut up. It's, it's funny with, with AI, especially because, you know, I would say one of the, I would say the most common pieces of startup advice out there, I'd say, is, you know, focus on a really niche cohort, you know, do things that don't scale, you know, make, make one use case. That's really great. and then you grow from there. And I think that's, you know, I think that's great advice across the board.

Starting point is 00:50:40 But yeah, it's kind of interesting because, you know, I think with generative AI, you naturally see this where a lot of product experiences can turn out to be more general. Right. And so it's an interesting tradeoff for us. You know, this is something that we still always go back and forth on and how much do we want to, you know,

Starting point is 00:50:55 yeah, to do more to support all the other kind of use cases out there and to handle other things that folks might want to do with Devon. I think another one that comes from, mind is how much Devin should be, let's say, like a single comprehensive project experience versus like a suite of tools. And as you can see here, you know, we have Devin Search, we have Devin Wiki, you know, we have the linear ticket scooping. And certainly, you know, these tools interact with each other. But I think as time has gone on, we have, we've seen it more and more as really building this suite of tools. And I think that, you know, I think the core agent experience

Starting point is 00:51:29 and the core kind of agent that will go off and build each of these, build things for you, for example, is always, of course, going to be, you know, that's Devin, and that is like the core piece, I think that will always be what's really special about our work. But I think that all of the other features out there, you know, there is a complex suite of work that's required for real-world software sharing, and engineering is just messy at the end of the day, right? And so, I think there are a lot of different flows and a lot of different use cases that make sense. And an obvious thing to point out is you could ask the same questions to Devon search as you could to Devon. Right. And Devon will go through and it'll do the same thing. It'll go through and look through the files and give you an answer and stuff. But with that said, on the one hand, I think on the capability side, there's certainly a lot you can do to really optimize things for very specifically question answer about this repository. And that made sense to really kind of build into a specific kind of feature. And then on the other side, I would say, we found that users actually really like having.

Starting point is 00:52:28 this axis of control, right? Sometimes you have a task that you're thinking about, but you actually don't want Devin to get started on the task just yet. You want to ask Devin and understand what parts of the codebase might be relevant, right? And so you want to be very direct about saying, like, this is just an ask, and I just want to see the snippets of codebase that relate, right? Or I just want to look at the wiki and understand the existing representation. And so it's kind of on both the capabilities and on the U.S. side, we've found that that's kind of what's naturally made sense over time. Let's talk about the landscape then of just other companies in the space, which is something a lot of people are always thinking about. There's all these different

Starting point is 00:53:04 approaches. You guys are going full-on AI engineer. There's obviously ID companies. There's also just like models being built that are really good at engineering. Everyone's kind of starting to build agents now. You guys are ahead on this in a lot of ways. Like Open AI just recently said they're going to build a software engineering agent. Anthropics got something there. You know, Cursor and Windsor have their own little agents and Replit. Thoughts on just kind of where you guys fit in in the landscape and then where you, how you think you win long term? How do you think about that? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:32 Yeah. And for what it's worth, you know, I think all of these are incredible teams. I think, you know, really smart and really forward-thinking folks who are building a lot of great products out there. And it's, I think there's, there's a lot to do, honestly, you know, over the next few years with the advent of AGI or whatever you want to call it. You know, I think one of the quotes that I love is in 2017, if you asked if we had AGI, the answer is no. And in 2025, if you ask if we have AGI, the answer is, well, you have to define EGI and, you know, it depends on your subject. Yeah. Right. And I think it does kind of get to the point of, of, I mean, there is a lot of really amazing stuff happening. You know, I think that it's easy to underrate, I would say, just how big of a shift it is that we're seeing, right? Where I think there are a lot of great products out there, for example, over the last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years that have made each of these kind of like kind of these different niches of the, of the,

Starting point is 00:54:24 the life cycle of building a product a little bit easier, for example, right? There's great products out there for instant response. There's great products out there for logging. There's great products out there for billing. There's, you know, all of these different tools, right? And the obvious thing is, you know, what we're seeing with AI is all of these spaces are going to be moving multiple times faster, you know, and it's going to be like an order of magnitude shift, if anything, right?

Starting point is 00:54:47 And so I think from our perspective, you know, we've obviously had a very specific lens that that we've been on this whole time, and that is, you know, autonomous coding agents. And there's a lot of problems to solve there, to be honest, right? Like the, there's still a ton to do on the core capabilities, certainly. And, you know, we see cases all the time where it's like, wow, why did Devin make that decision? That seems, you know, no human engineer would have ever done that. You know, there's all sorts of spots where, you know, with the product interface, there's obviously a lot to think about.

Starting point is 00:55:16 And I think it's, by the way, not just like a single thing that we're working towards, but something that will change with every addition of capabilities. Like, I kind of think of it as like, there's 20 generations of agent product, you know, agent coding experiences to come. You know, I think that I think the one that we'll get to over the course of several years is probably something where you don't even look at the code at all, right? And you're actually just looking at your own product and you're just able to look and specify and say, hey, you know, this button should be a little bit rounder.

Starting point is 00:55:42 Let's do that. And by the way, let's add a new tab here. And maybe we should save this information. Let's start up a database table and let's index it on X, Y, and Z columns, and you're just basically working with your products in real time and having your agent build out those things for you. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of generations, you know, in between here and there. But I think the product experience itself is going to change every single time. And then obviously, you know, there's all of the practicality of just

Starting point is 00:56:06 getting it out there in the world. And so, you know, folks obviously need to need to learn how to use the new technology. There's a lot to do to deploy into all of the messiness of real world software. You know, there's a lot of COBOL out there still. There's a lot of Fortran out there still. There's, you know, there's lots of kind of abstractions and details that folks have done. And so I think from our perspective, you know, we have been, since the beginning, have been laser focused on agentic coding. And that is the one thing that we've really believed in.

Starting point is 00:56:38 It's the one thing that we've designed for. And, you know, that goes all the way to even the revenue model with ACUs and having the usage-based setup. It goes into obviously all the product experiences. thinking how, okay, like, where do you want to talk to Devin? You know, you want to be able to talk to Devin in Slack. You want to be able to spin this up from your issue tracker. You want to be able to all of these things. And then, of course, the capabilities. And so I think it's, I don't think there's any one easy answer. I think it's obviously a combination of things. But, but this is really

Starting point is 00:57:05 that this is, this has been the space that we've lived in and spent all of our time in for, for the last year and a half. And it's going to be that way for the next five or ten years, too. Along these lines, a big question everyone always has in AI's moats and defensibility. It's a question I've been asking every founder that comes on. How do you just think about how to build a moat in the space when it's so much easier to build and these models are so much as built on these models that are themselves advancing so quickly? I'd give one slight kind of tweak on that, which is I think it's often less about moats and more about stickiness.

Starting point is 00:57:37 And what I mean by that is, you know, moats are in some sense, typically where folks mean by a mode is something that means that a competitor couldn't even enter the market. And I agree that at a high level, a lot of different folks had different layers of the AI spectrum, the foundation labs or the application layer or so on. I don't think there's any kind of like hard barrier that would prevent others from entering. I think what does exist is stickiness, which I would kind of define as, you know, once you have a product experience that you really like, are you excited to keep using that experience or is there kind of like, you know, is there an effect where it is just,

Starting point is 00:58:11 as easy from now on to just switch on to a new one and learn a new one and so on. And I think from that perspective, I think there's a few things that are really great about coding agents in particular. One I would say is there is a lot of just inherent kind of stickiness and learning and build up over time, which is that as you use Devon and as your whole team uses Devon, it's the same thing with an engineer, right? If you're joining on day one versus, you know, since you've been at the company for five years, you wrote half the code yourself, you've touched every file, you've built every single piece,

Starting point is 00:58:40 You know all the engineers. And so similarly, it's like Devin will really learn and build its representation of your code base and of your stack and of your process over time. And we'll be able to do a lot more with that. And then the other piece of it, which I think is really exciting, I'd say, is there really is a lot to do of what I would kind of call like a multiplayer aspect of code, which if you think about it is how a lot of things get done in the real world, certainly. And so, you know, it's one thing to have, you know, your own experience, which you use yourself as just an engineer. But for example, ourselves, like we see this all the time where some engineers are working with Devin and teaching Devin things. And as I mentioned, like, folks will have Devin onboard their new engineers and kind of convey that knowledge to that. Right. Or similarly, it's like, you know, I'll start a session with Devin in Slack.

Starting point is 00:59:27 And I'll say, hey, you know, it'd be cool if we could do this thing. And some other engineer will chime in and say, oh, by the way, like the reason we did it initially was X and Y. And so Devin just make sure when you do this change that you still support that workflow. And Devin will say, okay, sounds great. Or Devin will make a PR. I'll be working with Devin. We'll make pull requests and GitHub and somebody else will be reviewing that PR or give some comments. And Devin will work on that too, right? You'll be in linear. And so all these kind of spaces, it really does just kind of set up for an experience where basically where Devin can just grow in the value that it can provide for your whole work over time.

Starting point is 01:00:02 And so I think from that perspective, like, if anything, you know, it's, we, we want there to be a lot of innovation and a lot of new products and so on. You know, I don't think that the goal is to try to lock other people out of building. You know, there's a lot of stuff to build. And I think there's going to be a lot of different experiences. I think from our perspective, what we think about is more like, how can we make Devin more and more and more useful as you're using it more. It's very similar. We had Michael from Cer, the C. Curser on the podcast and he had a similar point of just he thinks Smotes are just kind of like

Starting point is 01:00:35 consumer like Google is the way he thinks it's like Google where people can easily switch. You just have to say the best. And that's the answer. Yeah. And it feels like you're adding to that of just like, but also if you can create some stickiness where it is very hard to leave because it's so good at what it's doing and it's built knowledge and integrated to your workflows that builds on that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:00:57 And I think one of the things that's, that's, you know, that's nice about our space, too is software engineering for better for worse has a very clear tide of value. And what it means is, I guess one way to put it is, is there is always kind of like a clear next level, at least for the next while. You know, I think there could be some point where you're just like, all right, just build the entirety of YouTube for me, you know? And Devin just does the whole thing. It's like, there's probably been like 100 million hours of human engineering time. It built, building YouTube, building the algorithm, building all the infrastructure, all of the everything, every little detail. and like, you know, maybe there's some time

Starting point is 01:01:32 where Devin just does that out of the box, you know, that's obviously going to be a long time from now. I think on the interim, on every level in between, obviously it's, you know, it makes a difference the quality of software engineering. And I think one of the cool things with developers, obviously is developers are really willing to learn new experiences and to put in effort if it means that they're able to have

Starting point is 01:01:54 a higher and higher quality experience. Awesome. I'm going to spend a little time on the tech that enables Devin without divulging trade secrets. Just what allowed you to make Devin so good?

Starting point is 01:02:07 Was there like an unlock with a certain model? A lot of some folks have shared like three points on and three point five was a huge unlock for a lot of their products. Just what's kind of the key to the way you've architected or built Devin that makes it work so well?

Starting point is 01:02:20 We obviously, you know, we've been betting on agents for a long time. I think that agents were doable and workable, like a lot earlier than most folks might have thought. But certainly, I think as the community has really rallied around it, I mean, you see the impacts of that in the pre-training. You see the impacts of that in a lot of the work that's done with these models.

Starting point is 01:02:42 I actually don't think there's been any, like from our perspective, I don't think there's been any single like step function base model shift or anything that has been kind of like a night and day difference in Devon. But I certainly think that the curve of, you know, every point on the chart. I mean, there's a new model that comes out every like every week now. has obviously made a big difference in terms of what we've been able to do. And then obviously on top of that, we work with the research teams at all these Foundation Labs to do a lot of our work on top.

Starting point is 01:03:11 And so I think that my hot take here, which I would give is I think the, I think in terms of base intelligence, we're honestly basically already there. And I think a lot of what we see actually and what we spend our time on is less so. Obviously, we don't pre-trained our own models or things like that. It's less so like increasing the base IQ of a model, for example, and more about kind of like teaching it all of the idiosyncrasies of real world engineering, right? And thinking about here's how you use Datadog and do this and here's how you might die. I can notice this error and here are the different things that you could run into and here's how you handle each of those. And when you're

Starting point is 01:03:48 ready, here's how you make GitHub PR. And, you know, this is true in engineering. It's true in other space as well. I mean, there's so much detail in idiosyncrasy to the work that we all do, obviously, a day-to-day. And a lot of it is kind of like teaching the model to mirror the complexity of the real world, I would say, rather than kind of like getting it to some higher fundamental level of problem solving, which I think the foundation labs are doing a really great job. There's something you shared when we were chatting before we started recording around the growth of previous kind of transformative technologies were very hardware-oriented,

Starting point is 01:04:24 and there was like a limiting factor to their growth, and AI is not that. You'll share that insight. For a number of reasons, I think AI is going to be the biggest technology shift of our lives. But I think one thing, which is what we were just talking about before this, which is, is, you know, most of the big tech revolutions that we've had over the last 50 years, I mean, I'm thinking about, like, personal computer and the internet and the mobile phone and stuff. They all had this, this big hardware component that was a big part of the distribution, right? And so, you know, you had the internet. And initially it was just these universities that were talking with one another. but obviously, over time, we got the whole world plugged into the internet, and it took years and years and years.

Starting point is 01:05:03 The same thing was true with mobile funds, the same thing was true with PC, right? And the thing that's interesting about that in particular, which is, I would say, we're already seeing the effects of that is, you know, in these hardware distribution regimes, you know, in these hardware distribution regimes, you know, there's a lot that pens on real time, right? And so, you know, folks who were building for those industries kind of saw their market grow and grow and grow basically steadily year over year as the number. people with mobile phones increased, right? As the number of people connected to the internet increase, right? And many of those businesses, it's still crazy to think, but many of those businesses got started right in the beginning. I mean, like Apple and Microsoft started like right around the same time, you know, and it's the same is true for a lot of the great internet businesses or wherever. But certainly it was kind of like it was something that touched the

Starting point is 01:05:48 whole world, you know, with time or a large fraction of the whole world. And it had a really massive impact, but it took place over several years, right? Because of the time that it took. And I think one of the things which is already, I'd say, different in AI is just how explosive the technology can beat. You know, once AI could, you know, and I think we're firmly in the, you know, past the inflection point in AI could, right? Where it's, as an engineer, you know, if you're not using AI at all, right, could. I mean, you're, you're falling behind, honestly. And it is a technology that everyone should have and should be using. And there's no kind of, like there's no weight on hardware distribution that that is causing that.

Starting point is 01:06:30 And it means that it means that the space is just growing so exponentially, basically. Michael Paulin has this interesting point that, uh, cliches are cliches because they're so true. And that's why you, they're like cliches. Like I heard that a million times. And I think it's like people hear this like, yeah, I know. But like it's actually insane. What is happening? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:50 That's what you're here to help us through this transition. Yeah. No, I mean, it's a fun time. And I think there will be, yeah. you know, real, real investment and real work that it takes, but I think from the perspective of us as engineers, for example, I think it just means it's, it's so important to stay in the loop with everything that's happening.

Starting point is 01:07:08 And it's, you know, as we're seeing, it's not only because of your learning and your ability to work these technologies, but it's also, you know, about basically, like, teaching, teaching the AI, you know, what there is to know about your codebase in order to make it really effective, that building with you and doing more of the things that you would want it to do. So on those lines, for people listening that they're like, hey, we should be using Devon at our company. What are things you've found to be helpful in helping an engineer at a company get adoption and be able to use Devon, either culturally or logistically?

Starting point is 01:07:42 So a pattern which we often see with folks is there will be a few folks at the team who are really excited and want to try out the new thing and they want to put in the investment and are really excited to get it going. and they'll go through all the setup, they'll give Devin the repos, they'll teach Devin how to run the Lent and the CI and all of those details, right? And they'll start off by giving it those initial tasks and kind of like help Devin build a foothold, basically. And as time goes on,

Starting point is 01:08:09 eventually folks will see, wow, Devin's writing all these PRs, Devin's doing this. Who's this Devin person that just joins the company is just knocking out PRs? Yeah, and they'll see that, and then naturally they'll get on and they'll get an account.

Starting point is 01:08:20 And one of the cool things, of course, is by the time they join, Devin already knows a good amount of detail about the repositories that they're already working in and they're working with that. So one of the really cool things, which we often see is, yeah, that the early adopters themselves can really pave the way, I think, for everyone else on the team. But yeah, I think the main thing I would just kind of call out is, yeah, it really does take, it's a very different product experience, right?

Starting point is 01:08:43 And I think it's, for what it's worth, you know, I think there's still a lot more that we should be, you know, that we can do to make it as intuitive and as clear as possible to folks like, how to use Devin and what the right steps are and how to really maximize value out of Devin. But I think that, yeah, it's the kind of thing where if you put in the investment and understand exactly what it takes to get Devin to be successful, it's like, you know, we've found ourselves that as time has gone on, we just use Devin more and more and more with every next update. So let me follow that thread. There's a question. I ask every AI app building founder, which is if you could sit next to every new user of Devin

Starting point is 01:09:24 and whisper something in their ear to help them be successful with Devin, like one or two tips. What would those tips be? I think the biggest thing I would say is, it really is just treat Devin like your new junior engineer. I think that's the biggest thing. I think folks come in and they see the blank page and they think of all sorts of kind of like various things that they want to try out.

Starting point is 01:09:50 of lots, where, you know, I think typically the flow that we see that works best is, obviously, you know, you can try demos, you can do things. But a lot of it is just like, yeah, let's figure out what tickets we want to get done today or this week and let's have Devon get started on those. And, you know, let's start with kind of the easier ones and then work with Devin and understand like what things Devin needs to get set up to be able to test its own code and do this well. And then let's scale up over time.

Starting point is 01:10:17 And then obviously, you know, as you work with your engineer, you understand. better kind of how to communicate with them or what what are the right tasks or projects to bring them in on. But I think that's that yeah, that really is the one-liner for us. Okay. There's a question of a meeting to ask. I just want to get back to this because it's something I think a lot about with with Devons. Everyone's going to have five Devons, let's say 10 Devons. Everyone's kind of turning into basically an engine manager with a bunch of junior engineers.

Starting point is 01:10:46 Yeah. Which isn't necessarily the best job in the world. It's just a bunch of review. At least you don't have to do performance reviews and one of once. But, you know, it's like sitting around, checking a lot of PRs all day. There's a sense of you become an architect, which is kind of what every engineer wants to become eventually right there. Like, I just want to think about the architecture. I don't want to code all these fixed bugs.

Starting point is 01:11:06 So I get that that's, you know, there's a good side to that. But just how do you, I imagine you're thinking a lot about this, just like, how do you make life pleasant and fun and enjoyable as basically an engine manager of, say, 500s devons in the future? Yeah, I can just imagine. in the performance, you know, it's, Devin, you've done a really great job on your task, but I really would like you to be more proactive in the team meetings. I just, yeah, it's, no, so what I'd say, it's funny, actually, because it's something that, you know, in terms of the wording that we thought a lot about as well, it's just, you know, we've used the term like manager of Devin's in the past,

Starting point is 01:11:37 which, of course, I think is a big part of it. But, but I think that the only thing I would point out here is, I do think, I think that the bricklayer versus architect is closer to the experience than being a manager. because I think a lot of the difficulty of, you know, management or, you know, the reason that, you know, that, that, that people shy away from it is, is more because of, you know, a lot of the kind of various, let's say, like, there's, there's kind of like all of the, kind of like the context and the ownership and kind of like the responsibility and stuff. And then there's also kind of all of the, the emotional aspects of it, right? Where I think working with Devin is a little more like just being kind of like, having more as like having an interface to hand off tasks and build tasks, right? And so, so, you know, the parallel that I would kind of draw is, you know, when we invented Python, obviously, like, we didn't, you know, it's like, in many ways, you know, the description and the outlining of tasks, it was obviously, it was like a different paradigm.

Starting point is 01:12:41 But, but I think certainly it was nowhere near, you know, what folks typically think of as kind of like management bureaucracy today, right? And I think that with Devin, a lot of it is just kind of like, it's more like finding the right levels of abstraction that you could work with Devin on and just kind of like finding the workforce that work really well. And the obvious thing to say here is it's a very, you know, it's like you can always have Devin take a first pass at things, right? And so, you know, you can take the first pass. You have Devin take the first pass. You know, if it's great, you merge it right away. If it's, you know, if it needs some touch up, you can obviously. give that feedback, for example. But a lot of it is like, it's more about basically like making Devon part of your flow

Starting point is 01:13:27 than it is losing control, which I think is the main thing that folks are scared of with management. Are you thinking about a manager Devon, like a Devon that manages other Devons? Yeah, yeah. So for what it's worth, Devon can start other Devons through the API, right? And so we've seen this happen quite a bit of times where naturally, if you have some big tasks that you want to do, like, you know, Devin will do this all the time. It'll chunk up and then unparallized into smaller Devin's. And so it's the kind of thing that you need to give Devin the

Starting point is 01:13:56 credentials to be able to do that. It's not currently something that is kind of like default enabled, but I could certainly imagine as time goes on that there's more and more of that. Devons all the way down. Yeah, yeah. I think the thing that's kind of interesting too is like, you know, with humans, the way I almost say it in technical terms, it's like there's this coupling of a context and a thread. And what I mean by that is like basically each human can only operate, you know, single-threaded on the work that they do. And they have their set of contexts. And then there's other humans, obviously, who can do other stuff at the same time, but they have their own context, right? With agents, one of the cool things is you can have an agent that's doing multiple lines of exploration at once, but is sharing all the context of everything that they find.

Starting point is 01:14:40 And so I think that this is very early, and I think we'll see this, but folks, obviously, love to talk about basically like systems of agents communicating with one another. And I think that there will be a lot of new paradigms to build for once we get there. And it's so interesting what you said about the decision between having one Devon and only one Devon do all the things and you just tell them things and they kind of fire off jobs versus you have five Devons and they're each doing individual things. It's such an interesting decision to make. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Two more questions. What's maybe the most counterintuitive thing you've learned so far building Devin that maybe goes against startup wisdom, common startup wisdom.

Starting point is 01:15:21 Something I've thought about a lot lately as we've built this is, you know, this is not my first company. Actually, for a lot of us, it's not our first company. Like, I think of our 26 or 27 people total on the team, like I think 18 of us have started our own company before this. And yeah, like one of the things I think about is, you know, there's actually your point about cliches, I think really spoke to me as well, which is, you know, There's kind of the really common things which you hear all the time in startups where you're like, you know, you got to move fast or you got to hire great people.

Starting point is 01:15:53 It's like, okay, well, obviously you do. You know, I wasn't planning on not hiring great people. You know, I wasn't planning on going slow. And similarly, it's like, yeah, you really got to build something that people want. Right. And there's kind of these like three to five things which are always repeated and they're always the common wisdom in startups. And I definitely had this this idea as a founder when I was starting initially that, All right. So those are the kind of the three to five basic things. But as you get really deep into it, you spend a lot of years into it, you know, you learn all of the thousands of other things that you have to learn to be, you know, to build a company, right? And I think to some extent that's, of course, true. And there's lots of little details that you'll get into with all these different things, right? Including team building and product and strategy and engineering decision making and fundraising and sales and every other component, right? But I also, I also.

Starting point is 01:16:45 I also realized that as time has gone on, more and more I felt like building companies well, sometimes just comes down to doing those three to five things just even more than you could possibly expect. And so with us, it's like, you know, it's, yeah, everyone says to go fast, you know, but it's like, yeah, we had a hackathon in November. We had another hackathon in December. We started the company officially in January. We, like, got the prototypes out to initial users in February. We did launch in March.

Starting point is 01:17:12 We got our first customers in April. You know, it's just like basically like, truly. pushing the pace in every spot where we possibly could has really made a difference for us. And similarly, it's like, yeah, everyone always says, you know, you should hire great people. But I think that the truth within that truth is basically like you should fight to all ends, basically, you know, to get the folks that you really want to bring in. And it's, you know, one of my favorite stories to share is we had a candidate who came and interviewed. he was a junior at MIT.

Starting point is 01:17:45 So he was very, very young. And we gave him our interview. He did way better than almost any of the full-time, like the full-time candidates that we had ever talked to. And so we said, hey, you know, what do you think about taking some time off of school and working with us and building out Devon? Like, we really think you're just going to be able to come in

Starting point is 01:17:59 and just have a ton of impact already from day one. And he thought about it for a while. He came back. He said, you know what, like, I'm down. I want to do it, but my parents really want me to graduate from school. And I'm just not sure there's a way to make it work. And so we talked to him more and kind of just understood the situation. And then, you know, and then we flew to North Carolina, went straight from the airport to his parents' house, had dinner with him and his parents.

Starting point is 01:18:27 We talked a lot of that, you know, it's a really, really nice Gujarati family. Kind of gave them some gifts and just talked to them about it and tried to understand. It's like, what would it take and what will we need to make work? And they just said, you know, it sounds like a great opportunity, but we really want our son to be. be able to graduate, right? And we talked that through and we figured out a setup, basically, where he could work for us essentially full-time, but then come in for his required classes and do what he needed to do to get the diploma, basically, but no more than that. And we talked that through, and then, you know, we got to a point where everyone was happy with that and then, you know,

Starting point is 01:19:04 went straight back to the airport and flew right back, basically. And that was, you know, that was the first and only time that I've ever been in North Carolina. It was just a great trip, you And it's the kind of thing where it's like, you know, hiring great people is one thing, but truly just never, never giving up and really giving it everything that you can to make it work for people who really makes sense to be on the team. And he's been with us on the team for over a year now. And he's been an incredible, incredible engineer. And we wouldn't be here without him.

Starting point is 01:19:31 And similarly, we had someone else who was, again, really, really talented candidate, you know, did amazingly well, very young and had a lot of great offers at a lot of other companies. And, you know, we were talking to them about, you know, He wanted to start his own company someday as well. And we were talking to him about, you know, certainly, you know, a lot of the obvious things, which are kind of like having him meet our investors or work with, you know, get to do work with customers or see a lot of these other components so that when the time came, you know, that he would have all the experience he needed to start his own company.

Starting point is 01:19:59 But the other thing that, you know, that one of the other things that was big is like he really, you know, he was talking with a lot of great companies already. He didn't want to burn any bridges. And so we actually worked with him and basically hand wrote all of his rejection. responses to each of the other companies and kind of worked with him on it to say like, you know, here's how you should say it in a way that's, you know, going to come off as like, you know, that you really did appreciate the time with them and that you obviously, you know, you want to remain close with them and stay in touch.

Starting point is 01:20:26 And it was the kind of thing, obviously, where it's like, look, obviously, it's our job is to make sure that he's happy enough that he doesn't want to leave any time in the near future. But I think it's the kind of thing where, you know, the way that you put together a really, really great team is by, it is by really what's, what's, by fighting for, for what's right for them too.

Starting point is 01:20:45 Wow. Those are incredible stories. And it makes so real these, you know, as you say, cliches, hire the best people. Like,

Starting point is 01:20:52 this is what it sounds like to hire the best people. This is what it takes. Yeah, no, and I was just, it's just like, you know,

Starting point is 01:20:58 a lot of things, yeah, we've, we've fought very hard to just kind of like, yeah, like reimagine things from the ground up because it's, you know,

Starting point is 01:21:05 a lot of it really is just thinking about like, yeah, like, where, where do we think the technology is going over the next five or 10 years. And what is the place that we want to have in that future? I wonder if people are going to be fighting for the best Devons someday.

Starting point is 01:21:19 Yeah. I'll give you overtime pay benefits, you know, free healthcare and everything. And then the Dunn's like, yeah. Trade Devons like magic the gathering cards. Yeah. And then just going back to your three to five things. So essentially, this is an incredible advice. Essentially, it's like you always hear, hire the best people, move fast,

Starting point is 01:21:38 build things people want. Yeah, build something people want, you know, stay as close as possible to your customers, right? And then I think the other thing is just always think about where things are going, not where they are today. I feel like those are kind of like the five things, which is, you know, especially in AI with things moving so fast and there's so much great talent.

Starting point is 01:21:59 You know, I feel like a lot of these are even more true where it's kind of like, you know, it's not just thinking about where things are going to be in 10 years. It's like thinking about what's going to happen next week, you know? And it's, obviously, things are moving very quickly, and it is very hard to predict. But you really have to, you really have to be very rigorous with yourself, I'd say, about, like, thinking through those things and evaluating all of the kind of the decisions that you make in that lens. And staying focused is the big takeaway to me here is like, it ends up feeling like there's a thousand things you should do,

Starting point is 01:22:30 but it's always these five things. Yeah. Scott, we covered a lot of ground. We went through every question I had, which is great. Is there anything else that you want to share, anything else you want to leave your listeners with, maybe a final nugget or something really? You want to double down on that we set before we let you go.

Starting point is 01:22:48 The biggest thing that comes to mind for me is, you know, there's a lot of different perceptions about AI, right? There's, I think, every, basically, every emotion under the sun right now. You know, there's a lot of fear, for example. There's also a lot of skepticism, and, you know, we're very skeptical types as well, and we always want to kind of try it ourselves to really see it believe that. I think the main thing that that comes to mind for me is, you know, I, I'm honestly

Starting point is 01:23:14 really optimistic about what we're building here with AI and, you know, not just with code and with Devin, but, but, but the, the, the, the whole space and everything that's getting done. And I think one of the cool things that that is, is really actively happening is just the ability for everyone to multiply themselves. And that's, that's how we've always thought about it. It's how we've thought about what we're building. And it's, you know, I think the, there is a lot more to do out there in the world. You know, I'm not too worried about us running out of things to do. And from that lens, it's, it's, I think that the thing that we've always been most excited

Starting point is 01:23:47 about is, is how can we all do more? I hear you, Scott. Well, with that, optimism, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, here we go. First question. what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Starting point is 01:24:07 In terms of nonfiction, I think for folks in startups, I think one of the things that I've really enjoyed is just learning and understanding the history of Silicon Valley. And there's such, you know, it's all of these things that we think about. Somebody invented them. I mean, it's one of the great realizations I feel like is like, you know, it's somebody invented the idea of a seed route, right? Somebody invented the idea of venture capital. Somebody invented the idea of like product market fit, you know, and all of these different

Starting point is 01:24:31 principles that we talk about. And so for that, there's a book called The Power Law by Sebastian Malaby, which I really like. It basically is just kind of like a, yeah, a tour of many of the great businesses and the great products that have been built over the last 60, 70 years in Silicon Valley, which I really love. I think in terms of fiction, it's a, I actually have always really liked the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's one of my personal favorites as a fiction book. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed? I have to admit I have not watched. I can't think of a single movie or TV show that I have watched in the last while.

Starting point is 01:25:08 So I'm looking forward to watching a lot of great ones post-AGI. That's got to be in the trailer. That's great. I like that. And that just shows how hard you're working, just how much it is going on and how fast everything's moving. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? It could be an app, could be something physical, could be,

Starting point is 01:25:30 toothbrush? One I would say is, you know, I have an, I got an aura frame recently. It's just like, you know, a frame that shows photos. And you can show a new photo every day or every hour or, you know, every 15 minutes or whatever you like. I've actually, I've really enjoyed it a lot. I think it's a nice way to just have, basically, just have picture frame with memories that come up. And then the other thing I would say as like a general purpose thing, you know, it's, it's not particularly new, but I would say, I think AirPods are actually extremely well built and well designed. I realize now that it's like, I basically use them for all. You know, I'm taking calls on a walk and I'm using AirPods.

Starting point is 01:26:07 I'm obviously, I'm like doing work at my computer at my desk. I'm plugged into AirPods. And it's, it works quite well, I don't see, for a lot of different situations. And it's, it's, it's, it's, they're very comfortable. They're very consistent. Yeah. I'm going to double click on the, or double down on the aura frame. I also, I got one of these for my mom and my mother-in-law.

Starting point is 01:26:27 And they're so great for just like sharing photos of your kids with your family. And people have like, you know, they've heard of picture, like digital picture frames, but the aura just does it really well. And it's really easy to add photos and they're just really nice looking. You can imagine, you know, not that long from now. We'll have the aura frame except, you know, Studio Giblifies every photo that you have in it. And then, you know, it's, yeah. Or just imagines things you've done that are really cool.

Starting point is 01:26:50 Look at my sweet life. Yeah, cool. And it's aura. It's A-U-R-A, I believe. That's how you spell it. If folks want to check it out, we'll link to it. Not affiliated. Okay.

Starting point is 01:26:57 Two more questions. Do you have a favorite? life motto that you often come back to and find useful in worker and light. Yeah, you know, something I've thought about a lot is a lot of the, a lot of the proverbs out there are actually contradictions, right? It's like, you know, birds of a feather and then you also have like opposites attract, right? You know, and it's kind of funny because it's, you feel that both of them are true and

Starting point is 01:27:23 often they both are true and a lot of it is about like understanding why. And one of those that I feel like, especially in the world of startups that I think about like all the time is I think it is very important to be focused and driven and to really maximize your potential. And then at the same time, it's also very important to not let your own personal emotion get tied up in your success or failure. And I think especially with startups because there's always ups and downs, honestly, even in the most successful companies ever.

Starting point is 01:27:57 Like, it is just like, you know, it's a rocky. road. There's a lot that happens and a lot that goes down. And I think one of the things which I've, I've thought a lot about is that somehow it's, you know, you really want to do your best and put your, put everything you can into it and, and do everything you can to, basically, you want to put it all out on the field, you know, but at the same time, you want to be okay with, with, with both wins and losses, right? And you want to be able to to move on and go into the next one each time. And something, yeah, I mean, it's, it's funny, but what I've found personally is that, obviously, it's, you know, it's really important for your own emotional state and mental

Starting point is 01:28:45 state to be able to do that. And we've had lots of mistakes. And, you know, I've had a lot of, you know, I had my first company, which is obviously, which was cool. But, you know, there are a lot of like tricky spots there and then over the course of cognition. I mean, it's been, feels like it's been already like eight years compressed since like one year. And, you know, it's still going at that pace. But it's, it's somehow it also actually makes you more successful, I think, too. You know, it's like you, you are just more able to to give it your best and, and to do the things that will lead to success if you're not tying it up in your own personal worth. So that is so interesting. I just had a podcast recording recently where,

Starting point is 01:29:23 with an executive coach, Jerry Colonna, that I think will come out before this, might be after this, that's one of his big pieces of advice. And it's a very Buddhist approach of just not a clinking and attaching to an outcome. Yeah. Okay. Final question. I'm curious if there's a story here, but we could keep it short. Is there a story behind Devin as the name and or is there another contender for Devin being the Asian?

Starting point is 01:29:47 Devin was the name from pretty early on. We were interested. We were working on coding agents from the beginning, and my co-founders are Stephen and Walden, for example, and we had this idea, all right, let's get started. And let's try to kind of like expand the box as much as we can. So have everyone kind of think out of the box and do their own thing. And let's have everyone do their own thing first for a bit,

Starting point is 01:30:10 and then we'll kind of consolidate and take everything that we've learned. And so Walden made a virtual developer version of him, which was called Dev Walden. And then Stephen made one of him, which is called Dev Stephen. and you know, we had all this. And then we were kind of combining it all into one thing. And we're like, okay, you know, it's Devin. And that was the thing.

Starting point is 01:30:26 And so Devin was like, yeah, Devin stuck for us, like, quite early on, I would say. One thing which we did have a big decision on, though, actually is what the image of Devin would be. And so as folks know, there's the hexagons. And then people might have seen this more recently. But there's actually also an otter, like a little otter with a laptop in its lap. That is Devin as well. and we had this debate over what to go with and whatnot to go with and stuff. And it's, it's been a while now, but somehow we still have both the hexagons on the otter.

Starting point is 01:31:01 Are you skipped over where then Devin? It's like, did you just have, just came into it? Oh, so Devin is, it's, it's a deaf. Yeah. And so it's kind of like when we were consolidating all the names, it just kind of seemed clear then that this would be a bit the universal dev that we all liked to work with. Yeah. Incredible.

Starting point is 01:31:18 Scott, this was so much fun. Oh my God. I learned a ton, which is always a really good sign. Two final questions. Where can folks find you slash Devin slash anything else you want to point them to? And how can listeners be useful to you? Awesome.

Starting point is 01:31:29 Yeah, no, we're at app. dot devon.aI. And you know, you can find us as well on Twitter or a lot of other social media. We'd obviously love to hear any feedback you have about the Devin product. Like there's so much to figure out. And I think the, like I said,

Starting point is 01:31:47 I think we're all still like 20 steps away from really the future of software engineering. And so it really means a lot to hear what folks think about the product as they're trying it out. And so please please let us know any time if there's things that we can do to make it better. Scott, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. Me too. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps. helps other listeners find the podcast.

Starting point is 01:32:21 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Inside Devin: The world’s first autonomous AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code by end of year | Scott Wu (CEO and co-founder of Cognition)

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