The Age of Async Agents — Cognition's Walden Yan & OpenInspect's Cole Murray
type: NewsArticle
description: Cognition co-founder Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray discussed the rise of "async agents" — AI coding tools that operate in the background rather than requiring constant developer oversight — in a podcast released Thursday. The conversation comes as Cognition, which recently announced a $1 billion Series D round, faces a growing wave of companies building their own background agents, from Shopify to Stripe to Ramp. Yan and Murray argued that the industry is moving beyond local agents like Claude Code and Cursor toward agent orchestration, where fleets of AI work independently as teammates rather than tools.
date published: 2026-05-28 18:41:24+00:00
date modified: 2026-05-28 19:00:22.378975+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: *The new AIEWF website is live! CFPs close in 2 days and we will run our first New Engineer Orientation this weekend, get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!* One of the central tensions in the agents industry is that even while there are major decacorn agent labs like Sierra, Decagon, Notion and Cursor being built up, it is also true that it has never been easier to DIY agents, with a plethora of agent frameworks like [LangGraph](https://www.latent.space/p/oai-v-langgraph) and [Pydantic](https://www.latent.space/p/pydantic) and [Flue](https://x.com/FredKSchott/status/2050274923852210397), and managed agents from [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/managed-agents) and [Gemini](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/managed-agents-gemini-api/) and [Amazon](https://openai.com/index/openai-on-aws/). There has been a wave of companies building their own background agents from [Shopify](https://x.com/simonw/status/2053529689122328947) to [Stripe](https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents) to [Paradigm](https://x.com/matthuang/status/2057500542298136899?s=46) to [Razorpay](https://x.com/shashank_kr/status/2056246734465253859?s=46), and even Cognition’s friends [Ramp](https://x.com/zachbruggeman/status/2010728444771074493?s=46) have [built their own coding agent with other friend Modal](https://modal.com/blog/how-ramp-built-a-full-context-background-coding-agent-on-modal). You’d think Cognition might feel a bit threatened, but they’re not - even after all this, they were way oversubscribed for the[ $1B Series D ](https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-cognition-raises-1b-in-26b?utm_source=publication-search)they just announced: [Walden Yan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/waldenyan), [coiner of context engineering](https://cognition.ai/blog/dont-build-multi-agents) and Chief Product Officer/Cofounder of Cognition, inv…
publisher: Web Pulse
keywords: ai-agents, ai-startups, ai-tools, ai-products, artificial-intelligence
mentions: Cognition
mentions: OpenInspect
mentions: LangGraph
mentions: Pydantic
mentions: Anthropic
mentions: Gemini
mentions: Amazon
mentions: Shopify
citation: CreativeWork