It scored 13.86% on SWE-bench, priced itself at $500/month as a replacement engineer, then cut that 25x and became a $10.2B company selling the supervised tool underneath. What two years of Devin teaches anyone buying agentic AI, from a fleet that runs agents in production.
On March 12, 2024, a roughly ten-person startup called Cognition Labs introduced the world to Devin, billed in their own words as "the first AI software engineer." Not a coding assistant. Not an autocomplete. An engineer, with its own shell, its own editor, its own browser, and a launch video showing it completing what looked like real freelance jobs on Upwork, autonomously, for money.
The internet did what the internet does. The launch clips pulled tens of millions of views. "Software engineering is over" takes bloomed for a week straight. And one month later, Founders Fund led a $175 million round that valued the company at $2 billion, for a product almost nobody outside the demo videos had touched.
Two years on, the arc is complete enough to read honestly, and it's stranger than either the hype or the backlash predicted. The demo was partly staged. The product failed most real tasks put in front of it. The price collapsed twenty-five-fold. And the company is now worth more than ten billion dollars anyway.
