Devin AI launches: Cognition Labs and Hcompany
Experimental Software automation Devin AI finally becomes a product.
Hey Everyone,
Recently Devin by Cognition Labs has finally gone live:
This is a tool for developers and Enterprise customers minimum $500 dollars.
Cognition Labs valued at $2 Billion after six months without a product previously, calls Devin a collaborative AI teammate and joins a lot of startups trying to build the same thing.
This as Hcompany released a few weeks ago the beta to their Runner H agent, that got surprisingly little press. Sucks being in Paris I guess.
Devin AI is backed by Peter Thiel created Founders’ Fund creating a mountain of expectations on this young team with a product that has been fairly controversial with several debunking YouTube videos of their demo announcement.
What can Devin do?
So what can Devin do?
Frontend bugs and edge cases
Unit and E2E testing
Building SaaS integrations
Devin also expands to other “backoffice like tasks“.
Web research
Repetitive task automation
Online booking and reservations
Software automation is obviously going to be a lucrative use case for Generative AI as a whole, especially as AI agents get better in 2025.
According to Victor Dibia (Microsoft), Devin AI is somewhat similar to some of the capabilities already present in GitHub Copilot .e.g, automatic code review .
Copilot will review your changes and attach its comments to specific lines of your code, including one-click fixes where possible.
I remain fairly skeptical about the long-term prospects of Cognition Labs giving their funding history and PR stunts, although due to the youth and inexperience of their core team.
The Era of AI Software Automation Assistants
The startup is only 14 months old and is likely already a Microsoft acquisition target. Some things to keep in mind:
Devin is built to collaborate with engineering teams and starts at $500/month.
Devin is integrated directly into your workflow. Work with Devin in Slack, GitHub or even your IDE [beta] to delegate tasks you don’t have time to tackle.
If it can make developers more productive, it’s price is likely worth it.
It bills its primary use cases as using Devin to fix frontend bugs, create first-draft PRs for backlog tasks, make refactors.
Meanwhile Hcompany’s AI Agent is probably even more interesting. They will compete more directly with Anthroic’’s Computer Use, OpenAI’s Operator and Google’s own Jarvis version of browser based automation of tasks.
As 2025 pushes an AI agent narrative even further these Software automation tools and startups will have to show what they can really do, and not just make flawed demos for ridiculous valuations.
Devin’s makers are known for silly slogans, over-promising and well - stuff young founders might think is a good idea:
“Our vision is for Devin to be the assistant that makes every software engineer 10x more productive. Software is such an important driver of progress in the world today – imagine what we could do with 10x more of it! At the same time, we want to be clear that Devin is far from perfect today. Devin will often work but will often make mistakes, write bugs, or get stuck. We’re excited to have more users try the product so that we can continue to build with your feedback”
What could possibly make a developer 10x more productive? Maybe Claude coupled with about six other tools, maybe a 20% gain in productivity? I’m not a software geek so I can only speculate on what I’ve read.
It’s time for Devin to face reality.
Hcompany says Web developers spend countless hours maintaining brittle selectors and fixing broken automations due to the ever-changing nature of modern web interfaces. So Runner H and Devin might be more similar than we think.
Hcompany teases that their “handles the complexities of writing and maintaining selectors behind the scenes, developers can focus on the semantics of the workflows and production – freeing up time for higher value development work.” It’s a familiar pitch up to this point.
I’ll keep watching this space.
Vibe switched on Devon AI. Thanks for the share