Walden Yan

Walden Yan is co-founder and CPO of Cognition, where he writes the company's influential agent-engineering essays — most notably 'Don't Build Multi-Agents,' which made the widely-cited case for 'context engineering' as the core job of agent builders and for single-threaded agents over multi-agent swarms. He speaks from deep production experience behind Devin, whose share of autonomous commits jumped from 16% to 80% across Cognition's repos. Expect first-hand architectural lessons on agent reliability, context management, harness design (VM snapshots, scoped secrets), and why parallel sub-agents make conflicting implicit decisions.