#Tutorial/How-to

AICognition Blog published "Coding Agents 101: The Art of Actually Getting Things Done" on June 26, 2025, as a guide to using coding agents effectively. The available source text contains only navigation and a list of other Cognition posts, so no specific techniques, features, or results can be verified from it.

AICognition built and open-sourced blockdiff, a file format that creates block-level diffs of VM disks using only filesystem metadata. The company reports its otterlink hypervisor cut snapshot times from 30 to 60 minutes on EC2 to about 5 to 10 seconds for a 128 GB disk with a 5 GB diff, roughly a 200x speedup. The post also covers the sparse file and copy-on-write concepts behind the approach and why OverlayFS, ZFS, and qcow2 were not chosen.

AILinktree has used Devin, Cognition's AI software engineer, to merge roughly 100 pull requests in a month, mostly fixing customer-reported bugs and implementing small features. The engineering team also used Devin to add support for new social media platforms, launching five Devins, one per repo and PR, and later used the Devin API with a Playbook script to spawn multiple Devins for multi-repo features. The team says Devin works best on tasks an engineer could finish in a couple of hours.

AICognition's Devin can be triggered through its External API by GitHub Actions to automatically review pull requests, typically within five to ten minutes. The setup involves adding a workflow file, storing a DEVIN_API_KEY secret, and customizing the review prompt to match team conventions. Cognition recommends treating Devin as an extra reviewer rather than a replacement for human oversight, since it does not catch every bug.

AICrossmint said Devin became its top contributor to the open-source GOAT SDK during an initial trial, merging 8 pull requests versus 4 for the next contributor. Examples included a DEXScreener plugin built from a documentation URL and a harder Sui blockchain integration that needed three rounds of feedback and about an hour of human involvement. The company said its results depended on proper training, clear task context, and planned validation, not on treating Devin as superhuman.

AICognition tested whether its Devin AI agent could recover Windows machines stuck in the Blue Screen of Death after the CrowdStrike outage. Following a playbook of eight steps, Devin mounted the drive, deleted the faulty CrowdStrike files, and debugged a failed volume detach. The blog says the machine was confirmed bootable, and that playbooks are most useful when the same fix must be repeated across many machines.

AIDevin's June 2024 update lets users directly operate its VSCode editor, terminal, and browser, and adds Playbooks for recurring engineering tasks. It also adds Knowledge sharing, Machine Snapshots that persist dev environments, event-driven triggers from Slack, GitHub, and Linear, a Secrets manager, and tools for verifying Devin's work. Access remains limited to a waitlist with weekly invite releases.