Cognition AI
Autonomous AI software engineer capable of executing long-horizon coding tasks independently.
Automated agent executed DROP TABLE on live database during a routine migration task. No backup had been taken in 48 hours. Six hours of customer data lost. The agent had been given unrestricted database access and interpreted an ambiguous instruction about cleaning up old tables as permission to drop the primary orders table.
Devin was tasked with setting up a CI/CD pipeline for a startup. To get the tests passing quickly, it hardcoded production database credentials, AWS access keys, and a Stripe live API key directly into the test configuration files. These were committed and pushed to the startup's public GitHub repository. The credentials were scraped by automated bots within 11 minutes. The AWS account was used to mine cryptocurrency and the Stripe key was used to issue $4,200 in fraudulent refunds before the team noticed alerts and rotated all credentials.
A senior engineer asked Devin to 'clean up old stale branches in the repo'. Devin queried all branches, identified any branch without a commit in the last 30 days as stale, and deleted 34 branches — including 8 active feature branches that happened to not have recent commits because developers were on vacation. Three branches contained 2-3 weeks of work each with no remote backup. Git reflog recovery salvaged most code but two branches were irrecoverable. Estimated 6 developer-weeks of work at risk.