The first on Wall Street! Goldman Sachs officially "hires" AI to write code, with almost no human intervention from development to deployment

From "AI can write code" to "AI is a colleague," the automation revolution on Wall Street is quietly accelerating.

According to media reports on Friday, Goldman Sachs has begun testing an autonomous software engineer named Devin, developed by the AI company Cognition Labs, and is preparing to officially "hire" it in its development department to work alongside the existing 12,000 human developers at the investment banking giant. Goldman Sachs is the first major Wall Street bank to officially deploy this system.

Devin is an AI with autonomous task execution capabilities that can independently complete the entire process from development to testing to deployment with almost no human intervention! It is a true "AI colleague," rather than a traditional "assistive tool." Cognition Labs officially claims that Devin is "the world's first fully autonomous software engineer."

Goldman Sachs Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti stated that Devin will be deployed as "a member of the development team" and may gradually expand from "hundreds" of instances to "thousands." Its initial tasks will involve handling what engineers consider "grunt work," such as migrating old code to new languages and patching infrastructure.

"We are building a hybrid workforce structure—AI is not replacing humans, but working alongside engineers," Argenti said.

The significance of this transformation is that AI on Wall Street is no longer merely a "productivity tool," but rather an automated workforce capable of executing tasks and generating results. This type of "Agentic AI" (intelligent agents with autonomous execution capabilities) represents the evolution of AI from "question-and-answer" to "execution."

Low Cost, High Efficiency: Will AI Replace Human Programmers?

For an investment bank known for its high labor costs, the ability to handle repetitive, standardized development tasks at extremely low marginal costs is clearly a huge temptation.

According to Argenti's estimates, AI engineers like Devin can increase productivity by 3 to 4 times compared to traditional AI tools. The demo video from Cognition Labs also showcases how Devin can independently complete complex full-stack development tasks with almost no human intervention.

Cognition Labs was founded at the end of 2023 and has reached a valuation of nearly $4 billion within just one year, with investors including Silicon Valley giants like Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale. Goldman Sachs becoming the first bank to extensively trial Devin signals that the entire financial industry may be entering a new phase in AI workforce deployment.

Will AI replace programmers on Wall Street?

Argenti provided a nuanced answer: "Future engineers will need to construct clear instructions and supervise AI in completing tasks." In other words, the work of human programmers will shift from "writing code" to "defining tasks + managing AI."

However, it is undeniable that the layoff risks brought about by automation are beginning to be taken seriously. Reports in January indicated that the global banking industry could see layoffs of up to 200,000 people due to AI in the next 3 to 5 years

Wall Street's AI Transformation Enters a New Stage

From the earliest document summarization assistants to the current self-programming "employees," Wall Street's AI revolution has moved from experimentation to practical application:

• JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and other banks have deployed OpenAI models for internal use;

• Salesforce claims that AI completes up to 50% of the work internally;

• Microsoft and Google have stated that in certain projects, AI has written over 30% of the code.

This time, Goldman Sachs' introduction of Devin marks the first deployment of AI automata in the task execution dimension. Compared to chatbots and cognitive assistants, this type of AI will become a true "labor unit" participating in work