After a year of Compound Engineering, Kieran Klaassen hasn't written a line of code
kieranklaassen · x · 2026-10-29
Kieran Klaassen (GM of Cora at Every) returns to Serverless Toronto to share how a year of daily practice transformed his AI-native engineering philosophy, Compound Engineering. Key facts: the loop grew from 4 to 7 steps (expanding at both ends — ideation before planning, polish after review); the plugin now runs on Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and 11 other agent hosts; Every Inc. runs five products with primarily single-person engineering teams; and he has written zero lines of code this year after 29 years of programming.
Key shifts over the year:
- He publicly retracted his headline thesis ("planning is the new programming") and stopped reading his own plans
- He then stopped reading pull requests entirely — with one condition that earns that right
- A model release in July broke his framework
Bigger picture: GitHub's COO reports 17M agent-created PRs in a single month and 1B commits in 2025, on track for 14B. When builds take hours, PRDs, estimates and review boards become the bottleneck; the work moves to deciding what's worth building and judging whether the output is good.
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