The days of pointing an AI agent at a backlog and letting it burn through compute without much oversight may be coming to an end. Cognition is introducing hierarchical budgets for Devin so enterprises can manage AI coding agent spending across departments, projects, and individual engineers. Administrators can assign budgets to different teams, track how much each one spends, and approve more capacity based on engineering efficiency. There’s a catch for developers, though; if a budget runs out while Devin is working on a task, the session stops.

If a budget runs out while Devin is working on a task, the session stops.

The feature grew out of conversations with customers, according to Lukas Burger, who works across go-to-market and engineering at Cognition. “Most of what we build starts with our forward deployed engineers (FDEs), who work on-site with customers. Budgets came straight out of those conversations,” Burger tells The New Stack. Once Devin moved past pilots and into broader deployments across organizations, he explains, the blunt controls that had worked for a single team — org limits, per-user tiers, and separate Devin Desktop settings — stopped holding up.

The problem Budgets sets out to solve is one of scale and sprawl rather than raw price. “That’s fine for one team. It doesn’t hold up when a bank is dividing a large ACU commitment across hundreds of groups,” Burger tells The New Stack of the older spending controls. Some of those customers had started building and maintaining their own internal tools just to parcel out capacity to the leaders of each business line, a workaround that mapped the exact gap Cognition set out to close.

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