Software Abundance for Government With Cognition's Russell Kaplan

Russell Kaplan, co-founder of Cognition — the company behind Devin — and previously at Scale AI and Tesla, joins the podcast to discuss what “software abundance” could mean for government. Our conversation covers… Why government software is so broken — Despite spending over $100B annually on IT, critical systems at agencies like the Social Security Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury still run on decades-old code that few engineers know how to modify. How two-year software projects become three-week ones — why AI agents are particularly good at the painful migration and modernization work engineers tend to avoid. What “software abundance” actually means — AI agents can handle the tedious work of switching systems 24/7, collapsing the switching costs, and forcing software vendors to compete on value rather than locking customers into outdated systems. AI for cybersecurity — From triaging massive vulnerability backlogs to automatically fixing CVEs, AI will be essential for defending critical infrastructure as attackers gain the same tools. The coming “post-coding” world — As models converge in capability, the key bottleneck shifts from writing code to understanding problems, reviewing systems, and deciding what should be built in the first place. Plus, the future of procurement in an AI world, fraud detection in government datasets, the DMV as a software problem, and why Kaplan thinks the real skill of the future is knowing which problems matter. Thanks so much to Cognition for sponsoring this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices