Kieran Klaassen

Building cora.computer | EIR at Every

Every/Cora

Kieran Klaassen is GM of Cora, Every's AI email assistant, shipped solo without writing code by hand. He is the grandfather of compound engineering: AI agents plan, write, review, and test every change; each fix becomes a learning the system reuses, so every unit of work makes the next easier.

Sessions (1)

The Era of Compound Engineering

2:25 PM·Leadership 2 · Room 3020

Most codebases get harder to work with every year. Yours doesn't have to. **Compound Engineering** is a philosophy where each unit of work – every bug fix, every feature, every code review – makes the next one easier. This talk is about how that shift changes everything: from how fast you ship to how many engineers you actually need. --- At Every, we run five products with single-person engineering teams. That's not a headcount accident – it's a system. When I built [Cora](https://cora.computer), I wanted to find out how much one engineer could do with the right AI workflows. The answer became the **Compound Engineering** philosophy, now with 17k stars on GitHub. Traditional codebases accumulate complexity. Compound codebases accumulate capability. Bug fixes eliminate entire *categories* of future bugs. Patterns become tools. Over time, the codebase gets easier to understand, easier to modify, and easier to trust. **You'll walk away with:** - The mental model behind compound engineering - Concrete patterns for making every PR compound - How to scale output without scaling headcount

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