Working at Cognition, in their own words

After meeting other former founders at Cog, I realized joining wouldn’t mean giving that up. … It would feel a little bit like founding another company – just with the support, infrastructure, and community of an established one.

Excited to announce I’ve joined Cognition! My first 3 weeks have been some of the most fun I’ve had in tech.

I’m joining as a founding member of the Applied AI team, and "impressed" is an understatement. I’m blown away by the drive and talent here. It’s rare to be surrounded by so many brilliant yet genuinely humble people.

This was a very tough decision for both Mitchell and myself. It was just another crazy move when an angel friend introduced this opportunity to us. … Time to go ship some serious magic with the Cognition team.

I was determined after never having worked at a company for more than a year - to find a sick place to work. … I entered the famed cog house at 12pm and left at 9. Kept thinking about everyone I met after I got home and how fun it would be to work with them. Turned out to be true!

Why Cognition: extremely well thought-out end-to-end product, model-independent, obsessed with customers’ ROI instead of tokenmaxxing, and a cracked team moving at breakneck speed.

There are real safety and security issues raised by AI, but they can be fixed. It's time to get to work instead of freaking out. That's why I'm joining Cognition as CISO.

Never in my wildest imagination did I think I'd get the opportunity to jump on another rocket ship. Meeting Scott, Russell, and the entire team at Cognition got me so excited to do it again with world-class technology.

Excited to work with a stupidly good team already on a generational run, and help shape where it goes from here.

This is why I joined cognition. Too many broken, backwards systems. At Cog, we’re starting to help change that.

i've officially left stanford to join the cognition research team full-time. … since joining cognition as an intern back in april, i've watched this company grow and myself along with it. i cannot think of a better place to learn and contribute to frontier intelligence w/ the support of such ambitious and kind people.

None of that makes Cognition a “chill” company. We’re operating in arguably the most competitive space in the world. … But the ambition isn’t imposed from the top; it’s how the people here are wired. We are here to win.

Things move too quickly here to wait for reporting lines and job titles to catch up. … Every second counts, so we organize around the work, not the other way around.

In a way, it feels like college after college. Someday, all the late nights, ridiculous stories, and people around us right now will be memories. … And what a joy it’ll be to remember even this.

A wise man named Ricky Bobby once said, “I wanna go fast!” Cognition feels the same way as well.

The new world of AI operates at a pace unlike any I've seen in my 2.5 decades in tech. … But a valuation doesn't change the work, and the drive continues at an exponential pace!

Over the last 6 months at Cognition , I’ve had a front row seat to one of the fastest scaling technology companies I’ve seen in my career. … But this feels fundamentally different and I’ve had to unlearn a lot and what I thought was ‘great’ and push the boundaries of my thinking.

So that morning we told everyone, “get on a flight to Park City this afternoon, and let your family and friends know you'll be unreachable for the next five days.” … I remember us barely leaving the house and running on adrenaline and Diet Coke for the next five days straight. … There’s this wild photo from that week where around three or four in the morning the night before launch, everyone is plugged into oxygen and grinding. It's still one of my favorite memories.

Absolutely crazy watching how fast things are moving here at Cognition. We've In less than 6 months I've been blessed to watch as our team went from ~175 people and a single office in SF to over 400 (and still growing) with offices around the world.

Not much of a LinkedIn poster but man is it fun to work at Cognition, INSANE pace, opportunity, and impact and still feels like a startup in all the best ways!!

the cognition will continue until morale improves

These days, everyone in tech goes on about how ‘cracked’ a team is. What I didn't expect at Cognition was how genuinely kind people are. It's the kind of team where someone will stay late to help me debug a problem that's not even theirs to fix.

Excited to have completed onboarding at the Cognition office in San Francisco. It was an incredibly productive week — the team was welcoming, deeply thoughtful, and highly focused on building quality products with real impact.

seeing all the old house photos really brings me back. lots of fun memories and late night gym sessions... wish I took more pictures but all I have is us trying to recreate the cognition logo with dumbbells

It was a ridiculous amount of coordination for a birthday bit. And it only worked because people cared enough to commit. The teams that pull off hard things are the ones where people care about each other enough to sweat the details.

Man comes in and immediately places 1st in our company wide poker tournament. Welcome to the team!

on the office vibes tier ranking cog would be S+++

Above all I'm grateful for the incredible team that we have. Every day at Cog still feels like getting in a room together and trying to build something great. Also, grateful that Devin is actually good now. Would have looked really dumb otherwise.

The dioxus team is insanely cracked.

One thing that gets lost in the buzz around @cognition: it’s such a fun place to work. Insane dedication to craft. Default optimism & trust. Electric energy. Little red tape.

It’s crazy how many product decisions at @cognition boil down to: “What would a cracked teammate do?”

How it feels walking around Cognition being > 25 years old

We got rid of internal titles on the legal team at Cognition. They are orthogonal to our highly technical culture and do little to align with our mission of expanding human capacity through autonomous software engineering.

At my first stand-up, Steven Hao, now our CTO, asked, “Wait, who are you?” I introduced myself, and we moved directly into the question we still ask every new hire on their first day: What have you shipped today?

Nearly 50% of Cognition came through referrals. That still blows my mind. … Scott still meets every engineer we hire. He’s flown across the country to meet a candidate for breakfast.

Of our first 35 people we hired at Cognition, 21 had founded a company previously. … A line we use a lot internally is that it's fun being on The Avengers. The reason is that we genuinely want everyone here to look around the office and see people that are excellent at what they do, while still feeling like they're a bunch of friends in a room trying to build something cool.

Dm me your resume and 1RM numbers

One of them is: we try harder. We believe the team *is* the company, and usually the best people in the world are already crushing it and happy in their current role. You have to put in enormous effort to hiring each person. If it's easy, you might not be aiming high enough.

My first meeting with Brandon Camhi was supposed to be 30 minutes. Five hours later, I walked away wondering if marketing should be my calling in another life. That’s when I knew Brandon was our guy.

Eight months and a company-wide performance sprint later, I’m glad we can say Devin is actually good. Still got a long way to go, though!

Finally able to show off what I've been working on: the world's first AI software engineer.

I helped train it during my internship there. The team is very strong and this is just the beginning!

internally we gave devin a credit card and people would have devin buy stuff for the office. you'd often see packages addressed to "Devin {last_name_of_designated_human}"

Auto-triage was one of the earliest product ideas we had for Devin back in 2024 but the tech wasn't quite there at the time. Today, Devin Auto-Triage runs in all of our internal bug channels + is the first line of defense before a human ever gets pinged/paged.

On every important Slack channel inside Cognition, we have a Devin automation monitoring all posts - triaging, solving, routing, reviewing. … The baseline hum of engineering progress is almost entirely autonomous now. Engineers steer the big bets for future product directions while Devins maintain and polish the status quo.

This was a few years ago, when AI was just a good autocomplete in your IDE. But I’d find myself waking up every day wishing I could text an agent and have it magically build my projects for me.

when I joined Cognition, training our own frontier-class model felt like a dream that was far away. We got there in 6 months - faster than even our most optimistic projection. With this team, truly anything feels possible.

Devin Fusion was the first major project I worked on after joining Cognition seven weeks ago. Over the weekend, I helped add Fable to the mix. … It was fascinating to see how much delegation styles vary across models, and how closely the best ones resemble good human management.

in my 2nd week at @cognition, i rebuilt devin's Command K (⌘K) palette from scratch with @ZreikJorge!

One year ago I joined Cognition to train the best coding model. We were a handful of undergrad and PhD dropouts, and part of me wondered whether we could really get to the frontier without the experience.

4 months in and 2 models wiser, I can't wait to keep building with this team.

turns out Devin Fusion isn't just marketing :) performance really is as good as Fable, enough so that many peeps daily drive Fusion at cog + our internal automations all run on it

Now I get to fly x-wings at work to stress test Devin's new 60fps QUIC based VNC Is this what they meant by "have fun at work?" 🥹

There's one really huge unfair advantage that we have at Cognition We were the first company with access to Devin

I got sick of reviewing code. So I made /walden-review. Its a skill auto-generated against my last 6 months of Github comments and agent sessions. It learned what I look for and even my comment style: “blunt, occasionally profane”.

i never thought i’d be a brand designer merging PRs and yet it’s now commonplace

Hard to explain the last 72 hours. … Far more to come here, but I have never been more grateful to my team or more excited about our future.

Wild is a great way to explain the last 72 hours but wow... the leadership pulled it off and we are now in an even better place than any of us could have ever thought of.

Thank you, Scott Wu, Russell Kaplan, and the entire Cognition team for leading with compassion and true partnership throughout the process. Onward!

It's been really crazy to reflect on 2025 - Codeium evolved and we rebranded to Windsurf. Google acquisition. Cognition acquisition. Combining products and teams. All while continuing to build, develop/promote, and maintain some form of productivity/growth in the spaces between.

A few months overdue. I am fired up to share that I have re-joined Cognition following the Windsurf acquisition to help lead and scale the Majors sales org. Cognition is one of the most talent-dense companies on the planet.

I was an early employee of Codeium that eventually became @windsurf. It is sad to say goodbye but Devin Desktop is the future this space needs.

One of the most common questions I get in candidate interviews is: "Why'd you decide to keep building at Cognition post-Windsurf acquisition?" The answer is simple: Cognition is packed with incredible operators who challenge me every day. … It's not for everyone.

Most of the conversation centered around the founders & engineers heading to Google. I knew the bigger story was about those of us who stayed... … And yes, operating with a massive chip on your shoulder is effective. Winning is the best revenge.

One year later and working at Cognition is still exhilarating!