Marc Andreessen Claims Software Development Speed Has Increased Dramatically with AI Coding Agent 'Devin'

Marc Andreessen previously argued that "software is eating the world," but back then, there was a speed limit imposed by humans writing code directly. Now that AI agents are handling code writing, the pace of software proliferation is accelerating to computing speed.

Cognition's Devin has seen the share of internal production code written by it surge from 13% to over 90% in the past year. This shift transforms engineers from craftsmen writing code directly into CTOs commanding fleets of agents, potentially improving productivity by 10x to 100x.

Real-world enterprise adoption cases include:

• Mercedes Benz: Reduced a COBOL migration that took 8 months to just 8 days.
• Rivian: Increased test generation speed by 10x.
• Itau: Devin automatically fixed 70% of security vulnerabilities in the financial institution.

Andreessen predicted that, just as engineer demand did not decrease with the introduction of compilers, open source, and cloud computing, the adoption of AI agents will lower software costs and explode demand. He praised Cognition's Scott Wu and his team for building a future where "anyone can turn ideas into software," and continues to invest based on their technical ambition and execution capabilities.