Cognition Brings Devin Directly Into Your Terminal as a Local Coding Agent

Cognition has been steadily expanding what Devin can do since its initial debut as a cloud-based autonomous software engineer. The cloud version runs in its own virtual machine, handles long-horizon tasks, and submits pull requests while you're doing something else entirely. Now, the company has taken a different angle: a local agent that lives in your terminal, works with your files, and responds interactively as you code.

Devin for Terminal is a local coding agent that runs directly in your terminal, working with your local files and environment to give you fast, interactive assistance right where you code. It's a distinct product from the cloud Devin, designed for a different class of workflow.

The move puts Cognition in direct competition with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex CLI, both of which have staked out the terminal-first AI coding space. The question is whether Devin's name recognition and cloud integration give it enough differentiation to matter here.

What Is Devin for Terminal?

Devin for Terminal and Devin are separate tools designed for different workflows. That distinction is worth understanding before you install anything.

Devin is the cloud-based AI software engineer that runs in a virtual machine, including features like Playbooks, Secrets, Knowledge, and other capabilities not available in Devin for Terminal. The terminal version trades those cloud-side features for local speed and interactivity.

Devin for Terminal can implement new features, fix bugs, review code, answer questions, automate tasks, and more. That's a broad mandate for a CLI tool, but the framing is familiar: you're in your project directory, you type devin, and the agent picks up context from your local files.

How It Works

Getting started is intentionally fast. You can get up and running in 2 minutes with Devin for Terminal, a local command-line coding agent with deep Devin Cloud integration.

Installation on macOS and Linux is a single curl command. The CLI command is devin, installed via curl -fsSL https://cli.devin.ai/install.sh | bash on macOS and Linux. Windows users have a PowerShell path, though Cognition recommends using the WSL install if possible.

After you restart your terminal, enter a project directory and type devin to activate Devin for Terminal. You can also preload the session with a prompt for automation, for example: devin -- check out this code and suggest a feasible, helpful feature.

The agent reads your local files and environment directly. Devin for Terminal is a local coding agent that runs directly in your terminal and works with your local files and environment. Inference, however, is handled in the cloud, so you still need a network connection and a valid Devin account.

Key Technical Highlights

• Devin for Terminal handles feature implementation, bug fixes, code review, question answering, and task automation.
• Devin for Terminal is bundled with Windsurf starting with version 1.9577.24. Enterprise teams using Windsurf get it as part of that install.
• User-extensible commands are called Skills. They are stored as Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, scoped either to a project (.devin/skills/) or to the user (~/.config/devin/skills/), and invoked as slash commands inside an interactive session.
• Skills can be invoked from the Devin terminal as /skillname arguments, with Devin appending the free-text arguments into the skill body at the $ARGUMENTS placeholder and running the skill with the declared allowed-tools.
• Deep Devin Cloud integration means you can escalate a local session to a full cloud Devin agent when a task outgrows what a local agent should handle.

Devin for Terminal vs. the Cloud Agent

The split architecture is deliberate. The ceiling on a local agent is your attention. Devin is a cloud agent. It runs in its own infrastructure and in its own environment, and can work for minutes or hours past the async valley of death.

With a local agent, you're faster. With a cloud agent, you can parallelize yourself. Cognition is framing these as complementary rather than competing surfaces, and that framing makes sense for teams that already use Devin cloud for long-running tasks but want something tighter for quick iterations.

The cloud Devin has shown real traction at scale. In their best week of 2025, Cognition's team merged 154 Devin-generated PRs internally. By early 2026, that figure had grown to 659 PRs in a single week, with total Devin sessions per week across all enterprise customers doubling in just six weeks. The terminal product is aimed at a different use case: faster, local, interactive.

How It Compares to Competitors

Claude Code lives in the developer's terminal with direct access to the local environment, while Devin runs in a dedicated VM. The interaction model is prompt-driven, with continuous developer involvement, in contrast to Devin's task-delegation model. Devin for Terminal narrows that gap, but the underlying execution model still differs.

OpenAI Codex CLI is a Rust-built, open-source terminal agent that runs locally on developers' machines, offering interactive, agentic coding with configurable approval modes. That open-source posture is a meaningful differentiator for teams with strict data policies.

Devin for Terminal's edge, if it has one, is the Skills extensibility system and the tight handoff to Devin Cloud when tasks get complex. You work locally to understand the codebase and put together a plan, then with a single click, you send it to Devin for implementation. Devin spins up its own machine and gets to work. That local-to-cloud handoff is something neither Claude Code nor Codex CLI offer natively.

Pricing

The pricing model uses ACUs (Agent Compute Units). The Core plan starts at $20/month with pay-as-you-go at $2.25 per ACU, while the Team plan at $500/month includes 250 ACUs. The Enterprise plan is custom and adds features like VPC deployment and SSO.

Devin for Terminal itself is available to existing Devin subscribers. For the Windsurf-bundled install, an admin must first enable the install option in Devin for Terminal team settings by toggling on "Show Install Devin for Terminal" in the Windsurf Command Palette.

Final Thoughts

Devin for Terminal is a sensible addition to Cognition's product line. The cloud Devin was always strong for batch, async work: migrations, test generation, backlog tickets. But a lot of day-to-day coding doesn't fit that model. You want something that responds in seconds, reads your local state, and doesn't require you to spin up a cloud session for a quick refactor.

The Skills system is the part I'd watch most closely. The official quickstart, essential commands, and Skills extensibility documentation are all available at cli.devin.ai/docs. Allowing teams to define their own slash commands as Markdown files is a low-friction way to build shared workflows, and it's the kind of thing that compounds over time inside a codebase. Whether the local execution model can match Claude Code's depth of context and tool access is still an open question, particularly for large monorepos where codebase understanding matters more than raw speed.

The local-to-cloud handoff is the real bet here. If that workflow becomes reliable, Devin for Terminal becomes a natural on-ramp to the full Devin platform rather than a standalone tool. That's probably the intended outcome.

What do you think? Have you tried Devin for Terminal yet? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

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