Fifteen years ago, I wrote that software is eating the world - at the time, a controversial claim. The main prediction of the essay has come true. As a simple measure, technologyâs share of the market capitalization among the ten largest businesses in the world has gone from 31.5% to 94.4% over that period. Amazingly, this happened even though only 1 in 300 people on earth wrote software, and every line of it had to be written by hand. Software has been eating the world at the speed of human hands. It is about to eat the world at the speed of compute.
Three years ago, when Scott Wu and his team began building Devin, the term âcoding agentâ barely existed. Today, if you talk to any software engineer at a leading company, theyâll tell you that agents write almost all of their code. In the past year, Devin has gone from writing 13% of Cognitionâs production code to more than 90%.
When agents write 90% of the code, engineers can literally do ten times as much. The 10x engineer becomes the 100x engineer, as they shift from writing artisanal code to operating as the CTO of a fleet of agents. The 1000x engineer isnât too far behind. As Scott puts it: âWithin our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together.â
At Mercedes Benz, engineers turned what would have been an eight month long COBOL migration into 8 days of work with Devin. Rivian teams increased their test generation velocity by 10x. Devin triages and patches vulnerabilities across thousands of repos at some of the worldâs largest financial institutions like Itau, where 70% of security vulnerabilities are automatically remediated by Devin.
Every time programmers get more leverage, doomers predict the end of software engineering. Compilers were supposed to shrink the profession. So was open source. So was the cloud. Instead, each leap made software cheaper to build, and demand for software, and engineers, exploded. It keeps happening because, as Milton Friedman observed, human wants and needs are infinite, so economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever (see The Techno-Optimist Manifesto). Technology is how we unlock that demand. Technology gives us leverage, lowers the cost to produce, and makes previously uneconomical use cases economical. For software, Devin provides that leverage.
It is tempting to think of this as just another application of AI - one vertical among many. But if software continues to eat the world, the automation of software itself accelerates every industry.
This future is core to how we at a16z see the world. We have always believed that software expands markets, that technical founders with seemingly unreasonable ambition create the future, and that small teams armed with powerful tools can change entire industries. Cognition is a powerful expression of those beliefs: a deeply technical company taking on an enormous problem, moving at extraordinary speed, and building for a market whose ultimate size is difficult to comprehend.