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Compound Engineering: Your Questions Answered Live

| 9 products mentioned
Every Every host
Watch on YouTube ai-assisted development prompt engineering workflow optimization ai customization knowledge management product building team collaboration

Kieran, the creator of the Compound Engineering plugin, joins Every's Austin to answer community questions about how to effectively use AI-assisted development workflows. The discussion covers common misconceptions about the plugin, how to customize it for different work types, and practical advice for integrating AI agents into professional projects without over-automating or making catastrophic mistakes.

Key takeaways
  • • Compound Engineering is a customizable philosophy, not a fixed tool—users should adapt it to their own workflows rather than assuming Kieran's setup is mandatory, and the `/setup` command enables easy personalization.
  • • Start with low-stakes projects to build trust in AI agents before deploying them to critical work; mistakes early on teach you when to accept or reject agent suggestions.
  • • The compounding step is the hardest part—documenting learnings in organized markdown files lets agents search and apply past discoveries without cluttering context windows, especially valuable with larger token limits.
  • • Review agents are the most transformative feature because they apply opinionated, directional feedback across multiple documents simultaneously, which surpasses generic chat-based reviews.
  • • Ship features one at a time rather than building everything at once—even when AI can theoretically do it all in one shot, breaking work into testable increments prevents overwhelming users and catches integration issues early.
  • • Test browser and end-to-end automation through visual iteration represent the missing piece for true product development, allowing agents to actually interact with interfaces rather than just writing code.

Recommendations (3)

Claude Code
Claude Code uses

"especially someone who's like kind of new to especially using Claude Code for both knowledge work and for engineering work"

Austin Tedesco · ▶ 3:18

Notion
Notion uses

"inside of our Notion workspace, we have this thing called the compound, which is where uh like when you finish a session, you can share the compounded learnings"

Austin Tedesco · ▶ 43:03

Vercel Agent Browser CLI uses

"It's the like the using the agent browser CLI from Vercel and like iterate on actual a product. I I think that's my favorite part now"

Kieran Klaassen · ▶ 54:52

Mentioned (6)

Linear
Linear "people say yeah but I use Linear or like how does it work? Um and well you can just change the pr..." ▶ 10:12
Cursor
Cursor "let's not use the work command but just put the plan it made that you reviewed in Cursor if that'..." ▶ 10:48
OpenAI Harness Engineering "you have like OpenAI with harness engineering which is like a variant of that" ▶ 12:50
Claude.md "and you can say oh yeah that isn't that Claude MD and memory and yeah that that's kind of a simil..." ▶ 13:25
Proof
Proof "Dan is building Proof which is a AI native Google docs basically so you can share things with peo..." ▶ 40:42
Codex
Codex "go interview plot or Codex or whatever tool you use on why they do certain things" ▶ 26:09

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