Cognition and National Design Studio Launch American Forge, a 6-Month Residency

Cognition, the company behind the Devin software engineering agent, and National Design Studio have launched American Forge. It is a six-month residency for engineers who will work on the hardest problems in the US public sector. The announcement rests on a single starting point: the federal government currently maintains more than 29,000 outdated websites. National Design Studio was created to clean up exactly these digital surfaces of the state.

What we know about the program

The announcement is short and light on facts. American Forge is designed to last six months, and the organizers are looking for "exceptional engineers." They promise problems that affect hundreds of millions of Americans. Applications are accepted through a form on the Cognition website.

The text does not disclose how many spots the program has, how the work is paid, whether participants need clearance for government systems, or where they will work, remotely or on site. It also does not say which sites and services will make up the first batch of tasks. These are the key parameters for judging the program's ambition, and for now they are missing.

Cognition's thesis: the bottleneck has shifted

The company states the rationale for the program this way. Teams that adopt Devin take on increasingly ambitious engineering tasks. By Cognition's account, development capacity no longer limits their work. The best teams have already finished code modernization, worked through their accumulated backlog, and are now pushing the frontier forward.

This is the company's own claim, and the material offers no data to back it up. The logic is still clear, though. Modernizing legacy code is exactly the kind of work that piles up in government agencies for years and eats up resources. If agentic tools really do take it on, the engineers freed up can work on the product instead of patching old systems.

Scale and rhetoric

The figure of 29,000 websites sets the scale of the problem. National Design Studio was created to modernize the US government's digital interfaces. Cognition describes the goal this way: agentic development should make everything, from the DMV and the IRS to your child's school website, as smooth as the best Silicon Valley startups.

A caveat is in order here. In the US, DMVs are run by the states, and school websites are maintained by local districts. So this is more a picture of the desired outcome than a list of the program's tasks. The federal level, where National Design Studio operates, remains the concrete area of responsibility.

Key parameters of the program:

• Format: a residency for engineers, 6 months.
• Organizers: National Design Studio and Cognition.
• Scale of the problem: more than 29,000 outdated federal websites.
• Stated audience affected: hundreds of millions of Americans.
• Tool behind the thesis: agentic development, Devin.
• Not disclosed: number of spots, pay, clearance requirements, list of projects.

What to watch next

Engineers interested in the public sector and in working with agentic tools on real legacy systems should apply, and should immediately ask about the non-public terms: pay, format, rights to the work they produce, and access to infrastructure.

For companies that sell technology to the government, the program signals that Cognition is entering this segment through the modernization of federal websites. If the results prove visible, pressure on traditional contractors will grow.

Industry observers should watch whether public metrics appear: how many sites have been updated, how quality is measured, who reviews the code written by the agent, and how security issues are handled. For now, American Forge is more a statement of intent than a proven result. A real assessment will be possible once the residents' first projects come out.