Latent Space: Devin's 80% Moment — Background Agent Architecture, 7x PR Growth, and OpenInspect

Latent Space·medium signal

Walden Yan (Cognition CPO) and Cole Murray (OpenInspect) joined swyx to discuss the background-agent shift. Key takeaways: the December 2025 model inflection made spec-to-PR workflows practical, Devin's merged PRs grew 7x with commits rising from 16% to 80% at customer organizations, and Cognition's real product isn't Devin alone but the infra layer (VMs, snapshots, scoped secrets, GitHub bots, Slack integrations). Murray built OpenInspect as an open-source background-agent system for teams that want the pattern without the vendor lock-in.