Walden Yan
Co-founder and CPO of Cognition, the company behind Devin.
- Walden Yan is the co-founder and chief product officer of Cognition, which builds Devin.
- He is the youngest of the three founders.
- He attended Harvard and left to work on Cognition.
- He won IOI gold for the United States in 2020.
Why it matters. For people building agents; he wrote Cognition's essay arguing for single-threaded over multi-agent designs.
- Current role
- Co-founder and CPO of Cognition1
- Education
- Attended Harvard; left to focus on Cognition2
- Neo Scholar
- Took part in Ali Partovi's Neo Scholars program2
- IOI
- Gold in 2020, ranked 19th, for the United States3
Writing to start with
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15 months ago
Don't Build Multi-Agents (opens cognition.com)
Argues single-threaded agents are more reliable than multi-agent systems because they keep shared context.
Links
Sources
- Cognition AI - Wikipedia (opens en.wikipedia.org) read 1 Oct 2026
- Cognition yeni yapay zeka milyarderini yarattı - Forbes Türkiye (opens forbes.com.tr) read 1 Oct 2026
- Walden Yan - IOI Statistics (opens stats.ioinformatics.org) read 1 Oct 2026
- Don't Build Multi-Agents - Cognition (opens cognition.com) read 1 Oct 2026
Last checked against its sources yesterday
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