Most frameworks for working with AI agents assume humans should stay in the loop at every phase. That’s the wrong approach, says Cora general manager Kieran Klaassen.
Kieran is the creator of Every's AI-native engineering methodology, compound engineering. His four-step framework—plan, work, review, compound—rebuilds how engineers work with agents. The insight, worked out with collaborator Trevin Chow, is about when to be in the loop and when to step away and let the model handle it. "LLMs are very good at just following steps, doing deep work, working for hours—days even now," Kieran says. "That thing is kind of solved."
Kieran and Trevin describe an AI workflow as a sandwich. Agents are the workhorse filling, and humans are the bread, responsible for framing the problem at the start and reviewing the outputs at the end. 
Every CEO Dan Shipper talked with Kieran for AI & I about why setting the frame of a problem is still hard for agents, why simulated personas won't replace human judgment, Dan's bar for AGI—an agent worth running 24/7 with no off switch—and what Kieran's background as a classical composer taught him about performance, polish, and finding the parts of work that bring you joy.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Head to http://granola.ai/every and get 3 months free with the code EVERY
To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 
• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 
  

• Compound engineering plugin: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin
• Compound engineering guide: https://every.to/source-code/compound-engineering-the-definitive-guide
• Compound engineering camp: https://every.to/source-code/compound-engineering-camp-every-step-from-scratch
  

Discover more resources in the episode
Timestamps:  
 00:00:00 – Introduction and the AI sandwich metaphor
 00:02:33 – What compound engineering is and how it’s evolved
 00:04:27 – The "work" phase of agentic coding is essentially solved
 00:06:27 – Why humans belong at the beginning and the end of an AI workflow
 00:11:06 – Dan's argument for why agents can't change frames—and how this will keep us employed
 00:16:51 – Full automation is a moving target
 00:23:21 – Musical composition as a model for human-AI collaboration
 00:26:39 – Find your place in an AI-accelerated world by leaning into what brings you joy

Most AI companies are racing to build bigger LLMs. Eve Bodnia thinks that's the wrong approach.

Eve is the founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, which is developing an alternative to the transformer-based models dominating the industry. Her argument: LLMs’ architecture makes them fundamentally unsuited for some mission-critical tasks. A system that generates output one token at a time, with no ability to inspect its own reasoning mid-process or guarantee its results, shouldn't be trusted to design chips, analyze financial data, or even fly a plane. Her alternative is the energy-based model (EBM), a form of AI rooted in the physics principle of energy minimization, not language prediction. Rather than guessing the next probable word, an EBM maps every possible outcome across a mathematical landscape, where likely states settle into valleys and improbable ones sit on peaks.

Dan Shipper talked with Bodnia for AI & I about why she believes LLM progress is plateauing, what it means for AI to actually understand data rather than just pattern-match across it, and how her team is building toward formally verified code generated in plain English—no C++ required.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Head to http://granola.ai/every and get 3 months free with the code EVERY

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Timestamps:

00:00:51 - Introduction

00:02:09 - Why correctness and verifiability matter in AI

00:09:33 - What an energy-based model is

00:14:21 - How EBMs construct energy landscapes to understand data

00:19:00 - Why modeling intelligence through language alone is a flawed approach

00:26:54 - What it means for a model to "understand" data

00:37:21 - How EBMs solve the vibe coding problem and enable formally verified code

00:43:21 - Why LLM progress is plateauing

00:49:54 - Mission-critical industries haven't adopted LLMs, and how EBMs could fill that gap

While walking to the office, our COO Brandon Gell had his AI agent call him and go over his emails in his inbox one by one. When he arrived, he opened Gmail and confirmed she'd done everything he'd asked. "My jaw is on the floor," he messaged me.

That was the moment Every got serious about setting up each employee with their own agent. Today, it's a reality—and it has completely changed how we work.

Dan Shipper talked to Every COO Brandon Gell and head of platform Willie Williams for Every's AI & I about what happens when everyone at a company gets their own AI sidekick.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Visit https://scl.ai/dialect to learn more about Dialect, a new system from Scale AI.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

00:02:21 How Brandon built Zosia, an AI agent to run his household

00:07:09 Brandon's aha moment re: using agents for work

00:09:39 What happened when everyone on the team got their own agent

00:12:42 How agents take on their owners' personalities, and why that matters inside an org

00:23:51 Why it's important for agents to do work in public

00:30:51 What we're still figuring out when it comes to agent behavior, including memory gaps, group chat etiquette, and the "ant death spiral" problem

00:40:45 How we built Plus One, our hosted OpenClaw product

00:47:27 The cultural shift required to make agents work at scale

Founded in 2019, Linear is the rare company started pre-ChatGPT to have successfully reinvented itself as an agent-native business.

On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Karri Saarinen, cofounder and CEO of the product management tool, to discuss building a platform where humans and agents develop software together—and why the "SaaSpocalypse" isn’t coming for all SaaS companies.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Visit https://scl.ai/dialect to learn more about Dialect, a new system from Scale AI.

Timestamps:

0:00 Introduction

2:00 Why Linear waited to ship AI features instead of rushing to chatbots

5:06 Linear's agent platform and becoming the system that guides AI agents

7:42 Why "SaaS is dead" is a simplistic narrative

12:18 How Linear adopted AI coding tools

17:45 AI's impact on product building workflows—speed versus thoughtfulness

22:18 The value of conceptual work and thinking before shipping

29:30 How AI is reshaping Linear's product strategy

37:18 Demo: Linear's agent skills, shared context, and code review workflow

47:48 The future of product development and the enduring role of human judgment

Mike Krieger built one of the most consequential consumer apps of the last two decades as cofounder of Instagram. He is now at the frontier of determining what makes a breakout AI-native product as co-lead of Anthropic Labs.

Dan Shipper talked with Krieger for Every’s AI & I about how his experience creating Instagram shapes how he thinks about building with AI, including what can be sped up and what remains stubbornly time-intensive.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Download Grammarly for FREE at grammarly.com

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:01:39

What's gotten easier—and what hasn't—about building products in the age of AI: 00:02:33

Why vibe coding creates "indoor trees": 00:05:00

How rewrites have become a normal part of the development process: 00:09:00

What "agent native" product design means: 00:11:39

How Mike's labs team is structured and the cofounder model: 00:24:27

The best signal for a product bet is someone with "break through walls" conviction: 00:29:33

Navigating enterprise customers while keeping pace with rapid AI change: 00:38:51

OpenClaw, personal agents, and the product question defining 2026: 00:40:54

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Mike Krieger: https://x.com/mikeyk

Agent-native architecture: https://every.to/guides/agent-native

Kate Lee has spent her career working with words—first as a literary agent, then in roles at Medium, WeWork, and Stripe. As Every’s editor in chief, she’s been the quiet force behind the newsletter for more than three years.

Lately, something has shifted in Kate’s work. After years of watching her colleague Dan Shipper evangelize AI from the front lines, Katie has started rewiring how she works and is integrating more and more AI tools into her workflow.

We had Kate on to talk about her career path from book deals to tech startups, what it really means to run a newsletter as a small team in the age of AI, and what she thinks the bottleneck to automating copyediting is. Plus: the story of pulling off reviews of two major model releases in 24 hours, and how she’s using her AI-powered browser to help her hire.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Timestamps
0:01 – Introduction and Kate's early career as a literary agent
4:45 – From book publishing to tech: Medium, WeWork, and Stripe Press
12:00 – How Kate joined Every and what made the role click
27:00 – What it's like to be a knowledge worker at the frontier of AI
31:00 – The “aha” moment: using AI to manage hundreds of applicants
36:24 – How Every's editorial team uses AI to enforce standards and train taste
45:06 – Publishing two reviews of major model releases on the same day
51:39 – What automating copy editing requires

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Proof: https://www.proofeditor.ai/

Every has unveiled a new product, built by CEO Dan Shipper. It's called Proof, a free, open-source, live collaborative document editor built for humans and AI agents to work in together. 
Proof started as a Mac app designed to show the provenance of AI-written text—purple for AI, green for human. But when Shipper rebuilt it as a web app with real-time collaboration, something clicked. Suddenly, everyone at Every was using it for everything from planning docs, to creative writing and even daily to-do lists. The team realized they needed a lightweight space where their OpenClaw agents and humans could co-author documents and leave comments. 
In this special episode, Shipper is joined by Every chief operating officer Brandon Gell, Cora general manager Kieran Klaassen, and head of growth Austin Tedesco to demo Proof live and share how it's changed the way they work. Brandon walks through a loop where his Codex agent writes a plan, Dan's personal Claw R2-C2 reviews it, and the humans just steer. Austin explains how he uses Proof to write a weekly food newsletter, texting ideas to his Claw on runs and watching an outline take shape. And Kieran makes the case that Proof's power is its lightness—just a link you can hand to any agent or colleague.
The conversation covers what "agent native" means in practice, why AX (agent experience) matters as much as UX (user experience), what happens when 10 agents edit one document at the same time, and why some writing is now better read by an AI than a human.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It's usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:

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• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com

Timestamps

00:02:00 — Introduction and the origin story of Proof
00:07:24 — From Mac app to collaborative web editor
00:09:00 — What makes Proof “agent native”
00:14:30 — Live demo: watching an agent join and write inside a shared document
00:20:51 — How Austin uses Proof for creative writing and food journalism
00:24:30 — The challenge of multiple agents editing one document simultaneously
00:26:48 — When AI-written docs are better read by agents than by humans
00:29:30 — Brandon’s agent-to-agent collaboration loop
00:37:09 — Proof as a lightweight scratchpad vs. existing tools like Notion and GitHub
00:42:18 — Why Proof is open source and what that means for builders

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Proof Editor: https://proofeditor.ai

• Proof GitHub repo (open source): https://github.com/EveryInc/proof

• Every's compound engineering plugin: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Silicon Valley loves billion-dollar moonshots and AI darlings. Sam Gerstenzang and Dan Friedman are doing something different—they're starting medical spas and funeral homes.

On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Gerstenzang and Friedman, partners at Boulton and Watt, which they call the "world's slowest startup incubator." Their model: Come up with an idea, achieve five or 10 million dollars in revenue themselves, then hand it off to a CEO who can take it to the next stage. They've used this playbook to build Moxie, a Series C company that helps nurses open their own medical spas, now with 600-plus customers and a 200-person team globally. Their second company, Meadow Memorials, is a contemporary funeral home with no physical real estate. It has become the largest provider of funeral services in California.

Both businesses launched right around the arrival of ChatGPT—and neither was built with AI in mind. So how are they thinking about AI inside companies where the core work isn't going to change? In this conversation, Gerstenzang and Friedman share how they built an AI agent called Matthew Bolton to power their customer discovery process, why synthetic customer calls completely failed for them, and why they believe you shouldn't give anyone credit for using AI.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It's usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Intent is what comes after your IDE. Try it yourself: augmentcode.com/intent

Head to granola.ai/every to get 3 months free.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 — Introduction and how Sam and Dan's paths first crossed

00:01:40 — What it means to be “the world's slowest incubator”

00:04:50 — Why Bolton and Watt runs companies to several million in revenue before handing off to a CEO

00:07:30 — How specialization across the founding journey creates advantages

00:10:40 — Building AI-durable businesses versus AI-native ones

00:16:10 — How an AI agent transformed their customer discovery process

00:19:30 — Where synthetic customer calls completely fail

00:29:30 — Deploying AI inside established companies

00:32:30 — Why newer projects see huge gains from AI while mature companies see 10 percent

00:37:00 — A preview of what's next for Bolton and Watt

Depending on whom you ask, AI is either the best or worst thing that can happen to the next generation. The arguments come from educators, venture capitalists, op-ed writers, and anxious parents—but rarely from the young people in question.

On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with one: Alex Mathew, a 17-year-old high-school senior at Alpha High School in Austin, Texas.

Alpha School, a rapidly expanding network of kindergarten through grade 12 private schools, is not without controversy. Inside Alpha High School, there are no traditional teachers, all academic content is delivered through an AI-powered platform, and the adults in the classroom, known as “guides,” focus solely on supporting the students emotionally and keeping them motivated to learn. The students have two- to three-hour learning blocks every morning and spend the rest of the day going deep on a project in an area they care about, spanning art, sport, life skills, and entrepreneurship.

Mathew’s project is a startup called Berry, built around an AI stuffed animal designed to help teenagers with their mental health. His vision is for teens to talk to the plushie for five to 10 minutes a day and, in the process, learn to recognize and cope with their problems in the right way. In this episode, Dan and Mathew talk about what a day at Alpha High looks like, what keeps students from cheating when AI is everywhere, and how Generation Z—people born between 1997–2012—really feels about college, social media, and books.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

In a world of generic AI, don’t sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com.

Intent is what comes after your IDE. Try it yourself: augmentcode.com/intent

Head to granola.ai/every to get 3 months free

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Start

00:01:30 – Introduction

00:04:08 – A typical day inside Alpha High School

00:06:54 – Why Alpha replaced teachers with “guides” focused on motivating students

00:12:09 – Why Mathew doesn’t use AI to cheat, even though he could

00:19:51 – Do ambitious teenagers care about going to college?

00:25:12 – Mathew’s take on how Gen Z thinks about AI

00:27:52 – How Mathew thinks about the effects of social media

00:31:29 – Gen Z’s relationship with books and reading

00:38:57 – Mathew ranks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok

00:47:12 – Why Mathew is building Berry, an AI stuffed animal for teen mental health

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Alex Mathew: Alex Mathew (@alxmthew)

More about Berry: https://berryplush.com/, Berry (@berryaiplushies)

OpenAI’s hottest app isn’t ChatGPT—it’s Codex.

In the last few weeks alone, the Codex team shipped a desktop app, GPT-5.3 Codex (a new flagship model), and Spark, the fastest coding model I’ve ever used. Usage has grown fivefold since January, and over a million people now use Codex weekly. Codex was also the app that OpenAI chose to run an ad for in the Super Bowl.

Dan Shipper talked to Thibault Sottiaux, head of Codex, and Andrew Ambrosino, a member of technical staff who built the Codex app, for Every’s AI & I about what OpenAI is building and how they’re using it internally.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Head to granola.ai/every and get 3 months free with the code EVERY.

Timestamps:  

00:00:00 - Start

00:01:27 - Introduction 

00:05:27 - OpenAI's evolving bet on its coding agent 

00:09:42 - The choice to invest in a GUI (over a terminal) 

00:20:38 - The AI workflows that the Codex team relies on to ship 

00:26:45 - Teaching Codex how to read between the lines 

00:28:45 - Building affordances for a lightening fast model 

00:33:15 - Why speed is a dimension of intelligence 

00:36:30 - Code review is the next bottleneck for coding agents 

00:41:24 - How the Codex team positions against the competition 

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Thibault Sottiaux: Tibo (@thsottiaux)

• Andrew Ambrosino: Andrew Ambrosino (@ajambrosino)

Every’s vibe check on everything the Codex team launched: OpenAI's Codex App Gains Ground on Claude Code, GPT-5.3 Codex—The 10x Engineer, Now More Fun at Parties, AI as Fast as Your Train of Thought