The Age of Async Agents — Cognition’s Walden Yan & OpenInspect’s Cole Murray
80% Devin Commits, Spec-to-PR Workflows, Full VMs, Agent Memory, and PMs Shipping Code
This post originally appeared in Latent Space.
“There’s a real zeitgeist in the space right now for companies to want to turn themselves into these autonomous coding factories.”
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One of the central tensions in the agents industry is that even while there are major decacorn agent labs like Sierra, Decagon, Notion and Cursor being built up, it is also true that it has never been easier to DIY agents, with a plethora of agent frameworks like LangGraph and Pydantic and Flue, and managed agents from Anthropic and Gemini and Amazon. There has been a wave of companies building their own background agents from Shopify to Stripe to Paradigm to Razorpay, and even Cognition’s friends Ramp have built their own coding agent with other friend Modal.
You’d think Cognition might feel a bit threatened, but they’re not - even after all this, they were way oversubscribed for the $1B Series D they just announced:
Walden Yan, coiner of context engineering and Chief Product Officer/Cofounder of Cognition, invited OpenInspect’s Cole Murray to talk about why the Devin is in the Details.
Full conversation live on the pod today:
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