The Era of Compound Engineering — Kieran Klaassen, Every/Cora
Kieran Klaassen built a complete email client entirely with AI assistance, without writing or reading most of the code himself.
He discovered that the bottleneck shifted from code quality to his own time—he became limited by repetitive tasks and decisions only he could make. To solve this, he built a memory system that stores solutions from previous problems, so when similar challenges arise, the AI tool doesn't need to start from scratch. His key insight is that he spends roughly half his time building a feature and half teaching the system what it did wrong, which ultimately becomes cheaper in terms of AI API usage and, more importantly, makes the next feature easier to build.
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