To Read—Or Not to Read the Code?

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I’m shipping more than I ever have, but I think my brain has gotten softer.

For the last year, I’ve hunted for the parts of coding that still needed me, then replaced myself with something that could do it, whether that’s a skill, a framework, a data source, or a step that routes work to the next agent. This is the essence of Compound Engineering: Teach the system to work once, and it does that work forever. This is how I build Cora, Every’s email assistant, and across my career, I believe it to be the best product and engineering work I have done.

But somewhere along the way, I found that I had lost a feeling. It used to be that learning itself was the reward. But my mind increasingly felt like a TikTok feed—full of short-lived hits of dopamine that left nothing behind.

I started to notice that although the work was improving, I wasn’t. My own mind was the part of the system I had forgotten to measure.