How to Ship Code Like a Team of 5: A Year Later with Kieran Klaassen (Every.to)

About this event

Last September, Kieran Klaassen (https://x.com/kieranklaassen) (GM of Cora at Every) showed us how one engineer ships a production product using a 4-step loop he called Compound Engineering. It became our most-discussed session ever. A year later, he is back to walk us through what a year of daily practice did to the framework. The loop he taught us has grown from four steps to seven. The Compound Engineering plugin (https://github.com/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin) now runs on Claude Code, Codex, Cursor plus 11 other agent hosts, and Every Inc. runs five products with primarily single-person engineering teams. And in June he wrote the sentence that makes this talk worth your lunch hour: “I haven’t written a line of code this year.” He has been programming for 29 years. What Changed in a Year • Four steps became seven - and both new steps were added at the ends of the loop, never the middle • He publicly retracted his own headline thesis (“planning is the new programming”) and stopped reading his own plans • Then he stopped reading pull requests entirely - and he will tell you the one condition that earns you the right to do that • A model release broke his framework in July. What broke, and what he changed The Bigger Shift: Why the Ceremony Stopped Working • The build phase collapsed. GitHub’s COO reports 17 million agent-created pull requests in a single month, and one billion commits in 2025 on track for fourteen billion • PRDs, estimates and review boards were affordable because they were spread across a long build. When build takes hours, that same ceremony becomes the bottleneck • The work moved to either side of it: deciding what is worth building, and judging whether what came back is any good • Kieran’s own summary: “implementation is only getting cheaper and judgment is not” Not Just for Engineers • The method already escaped the codebase. Every’s head of growth, who describes himself as non-technical, forked it into a version for knowledge work • What replaces the pull request, the test suite and the repository when the work is a document rather than code • Why evaluation is becoming its own discipline, and what a “personal benchmark” is • A five-rung ladder you can locate yourself on in ninety seconds, whether or not you write code This is not a product pitch and it is not a tool tour. The most useful material is the reversals: what he got wrong, what he quietly dropped, and what his own colleagues push back on. Bring hard questions. The Q&A is where this community has always earned its keep, and this speaker answers them properly. Homework, entirely optional Everything below is Kieran’s own, and all of it is free: • Last year’s talk at this meetup (73 min), the baseline this session measures against. Watch it and judge the change for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IOeygZRIY8 • “The Era of Compound Engineering” (20 min, AI Engineer World’s Fair, 2026), his best single overview of where the method stands today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ehJyfHg1Vk • The Compound Engineering Guide, the canonical write-up, co-maintained with Trevin Chow. Note it still documents the original four-step loop: https://every.to/guides/compound-engineering • “I Stopped Reading Code. My Code Reviews Got Better.” (January 2026), the most concrete account of what this looks like day to day: https://every.to/source-code/i-stopped-reading-code-my-code-reviews-got-better • “To Read, Or Not to Read the Code?” (September 2026), his newest piece, and a partial reversal of the one above. Read them as a pair: https://every.to/source-code/to-read-or-not-to-read-the-code Agenda • 12:00 - 12:05 PM: Welcome and community updates • 12:05 - 12:45 PM: Main presentation • 12:45 - 1:25 PM: Q&A and discussion • 1:25 - 1:30 PM: Wrap-up and Manning Publications raffle Who Should Attend: CTOs, engineering managers, senior developers, product leaders, and anyone doing knowledge work who suspects the same shift is coming for them. Usef