Scott Wu: belief

Transcript context

…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, Anysphere, Bolt, StackBlitz, you guys are Cognition Labs, like V0 is Vercel. And it just tells me 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 top AI companies. Yeah, and there's even, I mean OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic and Claude and Google. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So when we got started, it wasn't even really a company. I mean, it was more like a project or a hackathon almost. We got a bunch, we booked an Airbnb basically for a couple of weeks. This 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 was more solving these more contest programming problems and using an agentic loop to really do better on that. And so obviously if you run your code on the test cases, you can evaluate, there's a lot of agentic work that you can do there to try and do better, and that we spent some time on that initially. And then 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. So after that we had another hacker house and that's where kind of some of the initial ideas for Devin came and really building a software engineering agent and not just a coding agent and having to interact with a lot of these tools, but even then there were so many iterations. And even the idea of talking to Devin for example was like, it was something that we had to come up with. Right. Initially, it was just like you hand off a task and then it works and then it shows you 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, you guys can scope out the task together when you're working with Devin. And a lot of these things we had to develop obviously, and certainly we've learned a lot about the use cases, the form factor. We've made a lot of big improvements and step function improvements on the capabilities and Devin's ability to use tools and to bug and make decisions. And so it's yeah, it's been a fun journey. I mean, I think I would say that the grounding question for us really, which is one that we think about all the time, is really just what is the future of software engineering 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 underlines all of the product decisions that we make, so. 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?…

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