they are discord/twitter groups that pay people bounties to find deals, its been focused on sneakers and apparel for years but blew up this winter due to Nvidia RTX 3080, AMD cards/CPUs, PS5, iphone 12s, and xbox. Its not one dev, usually a team, they sell the software and discord group invite for a monthly fee ($60-500+) plus an annual fee for the software, and the software automates every aspect of buying including captcha, add to cart, checkout, payment, etc and uses proxy servers and can generate accounts so you can literally place hundreds of orders in the 1 minute or so anything becomes available.
You can't even really buy the bots anymore, instead they sold out all their keys, they do "drops" ocassionally for social media cred but generally all keys now are resold through their own version of ebay
The safest way to buy & sell legit sneaker bots
botbroker.io
"cook" (the act of making money), "cop" (to get a product), etc all are sneaker head terms generally derived from shows like Breaking Bad or The Wire. "Jesse, we have to cook"
Some of these guys make millions of dollars a year from reselling sneakers, they pay big cash to retail employees to set aside shoes only for them or to give a heads up when a shoe will go on sale online.