Engineer/ing/Compound
Compound engineering
- Development approach from Every: each unit of engineering work should make the next unit easier, not harder—by documenting bugs, review lessons, and patterns so agents and humans compound context over time.
- Contrast with traditional engineering, where each feature tends to add complexity and local knowledge debt.
Loop
- 1. Plan — agents read issues, research approaches, synthesize implementation plans (codebase + commit history + external best practices).
- 2. Work — agents implement and test against the plan.
- 3. Review — engineer reviews output and lessons learned.
- 4. Compound — feed results back into the system (
CLAUDE.md, llms.txt, evals, rules) so the next loop starts smarter. - Roughly 80% plan + review, 20% work + compound.
Tooling
Sources