In retrospect, async agents were the most AGI pilled bet you could make in 2024 - the models weren't good enough yet to vibecode, and people didn't trust AI enough to let it rip, nobody (including early Cognition) was sure about the form factors. Now it is obvious:
This 'obvious in retrospect' framing is doing a lot of work: Cognition launched Devin when the bet was genuinely risky and unproven. The key insight is that async agents required a trust threshold that the market hadn't crossed yet — Devin essentially bet on human trust catching up to model capability.