Walden Yan

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Cognition.

Co-founder of Cognition and coiner of the term 'context engineering', per the host's introduction and the episode page.

Why their word counts: 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.

Profile from this source, checked 2026-11-01.

In their words

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.

Walden YanCo-founder and Chief Product Officer · Executive, Cognition

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.

Podcast: The Age of Async Agents: Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray, Latent Space, May 28, 2026, at 00:03:01. Reported by Swyx.

7 x merged prs growth, about two to three months, as recalled by the speaker
10% engineering headcount growth, same period

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Sells AI tools Passage page

We’ve also internally done a big shift to make a lot of our core, components of code testable as purely local dev without needing to actually, integrate with, any live services for this reason. And honestly, the older the company, the more you have to change to shift in this direction. But you can use AI to help you perform this migration nowadays.

Walden YanCo-founder and Chief Product Officer · Executive, Cognition

Podcast: The Age of Async Agents: Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray, Latent Space, May 28, 2026, at 00:56:10. Reported by Swyx.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Sells AI tools Passage page

So we have like some Slack channels internally, maybe a Slack channel dedicated to, a specific product like DeepWiki maybe. And you can imagine that, or you want a Devin that never stops, it’s just always awake, but it has this like memory dock that it can just maintain for itself about, okay, what are like the number one priorities of what we have to fix and prioritize? Who is responsible for some upcoming work?

Walden YanCo-founder and Chief Product Officer · Executive, Cognition

Podcast: The Age of Async Agents: Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray, Latent Space, May 28, 2026, at 00:33:01. Reported by Swyx.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Sells AI tools Passage page

The SRE use case, internally we think about it as auto triage Because we just want every message that comes in, and that’s an alert, that’s a bug report, to have Devin just start triaging it before anything else. And we’ve leaned into this use case so much though that we’ve basically tried to make it so that you don’t ever have to leave Slack to interact with this.

Walden YanCo-founder and Chief Product Officer · Executive, Cognition

Podcast: The Age of Async Agents: Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray, Latent Space, May 28, 2026, at 01:03:24. Reported by Swyx.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Sells AI tools Passage page

I think we found that the state-of-the-art in December was you can probably, run this for about two weeks. By the end of those two weeks, you’d find that, hey, you want to, change the color of a button. Well, it turns out this button is implemented in, 10 different places, and they, have All these different variations, and oh, you forgot one of them, and actually it’s a slightly different color in one spot.

Walden YanCo-founder and Chief Product Officer · Executive, Cognition

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.

Podcast: The Age of Async Agents: Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray, Latent Space, May 28, 2026, at 00:44:21. Reported by Swyx.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Sells AI tools Passage page