"What would you do with an infinite army of software engineers?"
That's how
@ScottWu46, CEO of
@Cognition, opened his keynote at RAISE Summit 2026. Not a thought experiment about the future. A question about right now.
From November 2025 to April 2026, Cognition shipped 10x more software with only a 40% increase in headcount. Devon, their AI software engineer, went from writing 13% of their code in December 2025 to over 90% by April 2026, and most of its work now starts without a human prompting it at all.
His answer to the obvious follow-up, "what happens to human engineers?", wasn't needing fewer of them. It was that every engineer becomes 10x more productive, while the backlog of things worth building is 10x bigger than anyone's ever been staffed for. The DMV that doesn't work. The medical portal nobody enjoys using. That's not a shortage of ambition. It's a shortage of engineers, and that constraint just started loosening.
He closed the keynote the same way he opened it. By the end, the question isn't rhetorical anymore.
What would you do with an infinite army of software engineers?