‘Devin-kun’: Japan embraces agents as legacy code and a shrinking workforce create a perfect market for an AI software engineer 

Japan—famously slow to adopt digital technologies common across the developed world—has become a surprisingly fast adopter of AI, as it confronts both a shrinking population and aging digital infrastructure built on legacy code. 

“Japan was our first or second most popular country in terms of user engagement overall,” said Russell Kaplan, president of Cognition AI, the San Francisco startup behind AI coding tool Devin, in early June. 

The East Asian country has the world’s oldest population, with almost 30% of its residents over the age of 65. Japan’s working-age population is projected to decline by over 30% between now and 2060. The decline leads to a shortage of programming talent: In 2023, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) estimated that the country would face a shortage of 789,000 software engineers by 2030. 

Cognition AI is making Japan the first step in its Asian expansion, opening a Tokyo office in April; it will follow with making Singapore its Asia-Pacific headquarters later this year.

The firm is betting that Japan will be the ideal proving ground for AI-powered software engineering. “The needs are real, especially in critical infrastructure and government,” Kaplan said. “The country is running on aging infrastructure with a declining workforce.” 

The efficiency gains could be immense. Faced with a national IT compliance mandate, Sapporo’s city government needed to modernize over one million lines of legacy code, which Kaplan estimated would have normally taken 200 engineering months of work. Using Devin, Sapporo’s engineers completed it in roughly a quarter of that time.

Even before Cognition officially........

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