Cora's GM ships more than ever with AI agents — but says his own brain got softer

kieranklaassen · x · 2026-09-10

Kieran Klaassen, GM of Every's email assistant Cora, reflects on a year of Compound Engineering.

He spent the year replacing himself in coding workflows — encoding each automatable step into skills, frameworks, data sources, and agent routing so "the system learns the work once and does it forever." He calls it the best product and engineering work of his career, and he's shipping more than ever.
The cost is psychological: learning used to be the reward, but his mind now feels like a TikTok feed of short dopamine hits. The work improves while he doesn't — "my own mind was the part of the system I forgot to measure."
His fix: add a second loop that fills understanding gaps before they become blind spots in judgment, warning that the "dark factory" of fully automated delivery turns the lights out in your head too.

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