The Age of Async Agents — Cognition's Walden Yan on background coding agents

Summary

In a Latent Space episode, Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray argue that AI coding agents have crossed from local, developer-supervised tools into autonomous background systems running in the cloud. They date the inflection to ~December 2025, when frontier models (Claude Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2) became capable enough to go "from a specification to a completed pull request" with minimal friction. Cognition's Devin is the exemplar: 7× merged-PR growth, rising from 16% to 80% of commits