Ashlee Vance Profiles Scott Wu: The Rise of Cognition's Nerd King Behind Devin
kyliebytes · x · 2026-09-03
Tech writer Ashlee Vance published a long-form piece, The Rise of A Nerd King, on Scott Wu, founder of Cognition, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin.
- Vance first met Wu in 2015, when he was just 18 and already a Legendary Grandmaster in competitive programming, with piles of international contest medals.
- Wu grew up in Baton Rouge to chemical-engineer parents who came from China in the 1980s—indirectly, Wu says, because his father was a tournament Go player whose professor loved playing against him and moved to the US.
- The piece traces Wu's path from programming prodigy to building Devin and becoming known for bold acquisitions and poker exploits.
More from Companies & People
- MIT's free distributed systems course with prof. Robert Morris is online — MIT_CSAIL · 2026-09-04
- Former Frontier Lab Employee Laments: NDA Restrictions Last Forever — davidad · 2026-09-03
- Recursion wins FiercePharma AI Innovation Award for drug discovery platform Recursion OS — dom_beaini · 2026-09-03
- Support Team Uses Cresta AI to Coach New Agents Live and Ease Senior Rep Load — Glittering_Kiwi9694 · 2026-09-03
- Hugging Face founder reflects on a wild decade: 'code as a subset of ML' came true — nikiparmar09 · 2026-09-03
- Ben Thompson on Gemini: 'OK, it's now or never' — kieranklaassen · 2026-09-03