Walden Yan

In March 2024, The Harvard Crimson reported that Walden Yan, a HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry student from the class of 2024, had been named to that year’s Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; the program gives recipients $100,000 on the condition that they leave school. The report said he also served as Cognition’s chief product officer.⁠[1]

A Forbes report published in December 2024 gave his age as 21 at the time. In the report he recalled that when the team was struggling to set up a server, Devin fixed the problem by deleting a faulty system file, which made him realize how much software engineering would change.⁠[2]

On June 12, 2025, he published “Don’t Build Multi-Agents” on the Cognition blog, arguing that agents should share full execution traces because their actions carry implicit decisions and conflicting decisions lead to bad results, treating “context engineering” as the core of reliability, and on that basis advising against multi-agent architectures.⁠[3]

On April 22, 2026, he published the follow-up post “Multi-Agents: What’s Actually Working,” arguing that multi-agent systems currently work best when writes stay single-threaded and that additional agents should contribute intelligence rather than actions, for example a separate review agent checking a coding agent’s work.⁠[4]

According to ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry, he and Cognition’s two other co-founders, Scott WuScott WuScott Wu is an entrepreneur with a background in competitive programming and the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the artificial intelligence software engineering company that developed the AI coding agent Devin.Open the full entry and Steven HaoSteven HaoSteven Hao is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cognition, the AI software engineering company that developed the AI coding agent Devin.Open the full entry, are all gold-medal-winning competitive programmers who met through competitions.⁠[5]

Harvard University: Official website: https://www.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Cognition: Official website: https://cognition.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

Cognition: Official account: https://x.com/cognition (opens in a new window)⁠[6]