Cedric Cogell

Software Engineer. Previously @PatchTweet, @HuffPost. Co-started @HanselInvest, @avantdotorg. Schooled @MissouriState, @BardCollege, @Columbia

[Alex Turner @Turn_Trout]

I resigned from Google DeepMind bc it broke its founding promise by selling AI to the military without restrictions against killer robots or mass spying.

For months, I worked to stop this but watched powerful ethicists and institutions choose silence.

Here's what happened. 🧵

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

Less "Explore & Exploit" and more "Search & Enjoy"

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

now custom harnesses are more important. now LLM gateways are more important. now routing to the right model for the right level of intelligence is more important. and underneath doing all that well -> evals

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

https://t.co/Z7TNNSpD7f

if anthropic really cracks down this would be a big change to how I think about the next year…

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

the economics of getting good workflow outcomes with lower token bills becomes more important and thus optimizing parts of those workflows into old fashioned code gets more important

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

The IDE for knowledge work is coming:
- execution: agents schedule jobs and keep working when your laptop is closed.
- memory: they can safely update local files at 3am.
- co-workspace: you + agents co-author markdown, HTML, and your memory system, w/ parallel chats

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

with agentic coding, add to the list of things that remain true, its easy to get carried away and over build something before you know if its (1) what you really want and (2) how valuable it is -> prototype light and fast first!

[Kat ⊷ the Poet Engineer @poetengineer__]

all my obsidian notes are now a living, digital garden 🌿🌸
each plant is a notes from a tag: older ones on the trunk, newer ones as leaves. i wanted to create a sense of tending your garden, so scrubbing the timeline lets you watch your notes grow chronologically.

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

had to cancel @OpenAI once I saw the DoW contract allows for “any lawful use”

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

https://t.co/vhPAdMb6el

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

Look you want a bike for the mind? You have to stop running and peddle instead. You will still walk some and run a little. But you're no longer gonna use running for most of your travel.

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

A “duh” thought that still feels helpful to me:

Everything that survives the bitter lesson are those constraints on the LLM that improvement in its intelligence doesn’t alleviate.

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

And some great discussion here about domain specific UIs and why my lil day dream might not play out certain ways or outside a small group of people - https://t.co/kgI9TT0elL

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

I have this head that all apps in the near future will have ways to endlessly tweak them and users will constantly be changing things until it fits like a glove (with an agent that has access to the code of the product). Plant a seed in your software garden and help it grow.

[geoff @GeoffreyHuntley]

coining this expression before anyone else nabs it

> the product is the ide <

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

https://t.co/bvK1Y70FvN

[Justin McCarthy @BuiltByJustin]

our job is to illuminate the terrain. when the agent wakes up, it needs the correct path to be obvious. we don't have great control over the terrain, but we do control how it's lit - that's the engineering part of context engineering

[Cedric Cogell @Cogell]

a glimpse of the new horizon https://t.co/ahkjiew4nS

[Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt]

"AI code review" should be about teaching people how the code works, not just verifying that it's correct

We can now generate essays, diagrams, and explorable explanations on demand!! Why are we still reading raw code diffs as the primary UI?