Back in 2024, the gay dating app Grindr became one of the first public companies to begin using A.I. coding agents—specifically a bot named “Devin,” from the S.F.-based startup Cognition. But as C.E.O. George Arison recently told me, early coding agents never quite lived up to his expectations. For one thing, Devin wasn’t great for mobile, Grindr’s primary platform. Another difficulty was navigating the company’s 17-year-old codebase, which included “thousands of lines of code that was not necessary,” Arison told me. At the time, Devin didn’t make much of a difference to the company’s operations. These days, however, all that’s changed. Using more-modern agents, Arison said, is like “creating air on Mars.”