“it grew like 7X over, the last, I think it was, two months, three months, something like that. And then you see our engineering headcount growth. It’s, gone up by, 10% or something.”
Context. Walden Yan was describing an internal graph of Cognition's merged pull requests, which he said had grown 7X; the passage is the continuation of that answer.
Walden Yan, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer. Co-founder and product chief of the company that makes Devin, so he sees its internal usage data; Cognition sells AI coding agents and has reason to present them favorably.
Cognition sells AI or agent tooling, so it has a reason to publish flattering numbers about AI. The passage stays in the archive; read it with that in mind.
How this was checked
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-01).
Exact match. The turn is labeled 'Walden [00:03:01]'. Swyx's interjection comes before it, not inside the passage.
How to cite this passage
Walden Yan (Cognition), “The Age of Async Agents: Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray”, Latent Space, 2026-05-28, at 00:03:01. https://latent.space/p/cognition Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/cognition-merged-prs-grew-7x-engineering-headcount-2026
Context. Yan was describing an internal experiment building real products by auto-merging AI-written code with no code review, to see how many weeks it could run before the codebase became unmanageable.
Cognition