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

Last September, Kieran Klaassen (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 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. Useful whether you have been running this method for a year or have never installed anything.
Format: Virtual lunch and learn. Grab your lunch and join us.