Cognition CEO Scott Wu on acquiring Windsurf, AI replacing engineers, and the Moneyball-ification of everything

Scott Wu joins John Collison to talk about Cognition’s AI software engineer, the Moneyball-ification of everything, math competitions with Alexandr Wang in 6th grade, acquiring Windsurf over a weekend, whether coding tools will be replaced by the labs, and why he thinks we already have AGI. Full transcript on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/cheekypint/p/cognition-ceo-scott-wu-on-acquiring Timestamps (00:00) Intro (01:13) Early life and maths competitions (03:47) Addepar job as a high schooler (05:43) Where are all the young founders? (08:45) Moneyball-ification of everything (11:42) Cognition’s AI software engineer, Devin (15:46) Essential and accidental complexity (17:59) How Devin works with enterprises (19:48) IDE productivity (21:56) Nihilist computer use argument (25:55) Benchmarking Devin (27:15) Market structure (30:32) Agent economy (37:21) Cognition’s team of founders (39:31) Jevons paradox and software (42:00) When will we see AI UIs? (45:52) “I think we have AGI” (47:03) Windsurf deal (52:37) M&A in AI (54:21) Cognition’s culture (55:48) Learning as a CEO (57:12) Scott’s information diet