Cognition CEO says AI coding agents are helpers, not human replacements

Cognition’s latest funding haul says investors still believe autonomous coding can command startup-scale money. Scott Wu’s explanation says something more practical for software teams: even the builders of AI agents are not ready to call programmers obsolete.

The company raised more than $1 billion at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, then Wu pushed back on the idea that Devin is meant to replace engineers. He described the product as a helper that lets engineers build more, not a substitute for the people who decide what should be built, catch mistakes, or own the result when software breaks. Cognition has also said 89% of the code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin, with the rest coming from local agents in Windsurf, the AI coding tool it acquired last year.

That split matters because it shows where the work is moving first. Drafting code, refactoring, summarizing files, and executing repetitive tasks are the pieces most likely to be automated before the higher-stakes parts of a software job. Review, coordination, product judgment, and accountability still sit with humans, especially when code moves from a private workspace into customer-facing systems.

For monday.com, that is not a distant abstraction. On March 11, 2026, the company introduced infrastructure that lets AI agents sign up, authenticate, and operate directly inside its platform under the same permissions, security, and governance rules that human teams already use. On May 6, 2026, monday.com said it was rebuilding itself as an AI work platform around people and agents working together, with monday agents designed so any team member can configure and deploy them without technical background. The company said those agents can draft campaigns, qualify leads, close support tickets, onboard new hires, and process purchase requests under human supervision.

That framing lines up with the company’s Q1 2026 results. monday.com reported revenue of $351.3 million, up 24% year over year, along with record GAAP and non-GAAP operating income and record net adds of customers with more than $500,000 in annual recurring revenue. In its earnings release, the company said its business grows as AI takes on more work for customers.

For engineers, product managers, and sales teams inside monday.com, the lesson is not that AI is coming for every seat. It is that the company’s AI push, from monday magic and monday vibe to monday sidekick, monday agents, and monday campaigns, is moving toward a workflow where software does more of the typing and humans still decide what is safe, useful, and ready to ship. That is the reality check behind the valuation headline.