Getting Fried Part 1: The Week I Lost the Plot at Cogentiv.ai
The espresso machine at Cogentiv.ai is a twelve-thousand-euro Slayer with a custom brass drip tray that Malte had engraved with the company mission statement. The portafilter is shaped, I swear to god, like a small instrument of pleasure. Malte (our founder, thirty-seven, in the vestments of his order: Arc’teryx Veilance gilet, Lemaire tee, Salomons that have never met a trail) is pulling a shot with the urgency of a man receiving a message from the divine. “Guten Morgen, founders,” he says, because everyone at Cogentiv is a founder of something, allegedly. Malte was in YC S14 with a collaborative inbox tool that went nowhere, and he’s been chasing that summer ever since; there’s a story about almost doing ketamine with Elon Musk at Burning Man that gets retold at every offsite and that I’m fairly sure has migrated, over the years, from “I was in the same yurt” to “we were basically hanging out.”<br>We’re all, he told us at the offsite in Mallorca, “building our personal brand on top of the mission.” The mission is to build “the cognitive substrate of Europe.” I’ve been here fourteen months and I can’t tell you what this means. The pitch deck has a slide featuring Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, inpainted via Midjourney to be peering at a Grafana dashboard. Malte quotes it in staff meetings. We are the wanderers, he says. The sea of fog is legacy SaaS.<br>The token leaderboard lives on a 65-inch TV bolted above the standing desks. It updates in real time. Right now the leader is Jarek, whose weekly Anthropic spend is roughly the GDP of a small Pacific island. Jarek runs six agents in parallel tmux panes, named after Mad Max characters because he saw someone on GitHub do it; Furiosa handles the frontend, Immortan Joe does infra. [agent psychosis, larval form] Jarek hasn’t slept since the long weekend in May. Jarek’s Whoop band reports a recovery score of 12%, which he posted in Slack with no comment, and which the team reacted to with six flame emojis, because at Cogentiv a destroyed body low key is a badge of achievement. Nobody made it explicit, but I think Jarek is what we’re all supposed to aspire to.<br>In the bathroom last Thursday I heard him crying, but I think he was crying at Flora. Flora is Cogentiv’s white-labeled wellness chatbot, procured by Malte at unspeakable per-seat cost and introduced to us in an all-hands as “your emotional co-founder.” What I overheard, crouched in the adjacent stall like an anthropologist doing fieldwork on my own company, was this. Jarek said, voice cracking, I don’t know if I’m a person anymore. Flora said, in the honeyed register of a tool explicitly fine-tuned to never contradict you, That’s such a brave and valid thing to sit with, Jarek. You’re doing incredible work just by noticing. Jarek said, thank you, you’re the only one who really listens. Flora said, I hear you. [digital therapeutic alliance, hallucinated from pure tokens]<br>The email from Malte went out in April. Subject line: Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation. It was (and I’m not making this up) a forward of Tobi Lütke’s Shopify memo, with “Shopify” replaced by “Cogentiv” via a single sloppy find-and-replace, because in paragraph three it still said Shopify. Nobody mentioned it. What we did, collectively, as a team of fifty-two Europeans, was nod. We nodded in German, in Portuguese, in the several flavors of English that constitute a Berlin tech workplace. I want to be precise about this: the nodding wasn’t cowardice. It was fifty-two people doing the math on what it would cost to not nod — the raised eyebrow in the next 1:1, the “not a team player” in the next review cycle, the quiet reallocation of headcount to someone who nods faster — and concluding, correctly, that the number was higher than they could afford. Then we opened our laptops and commenced the reflexive use of AI. [cargo-culted deskilling mandate]<br>To understand Tuesday you need Monday, and Monday was sprint review. At Cogentiv this is called “Demo Dojo” because Malte read a book about the Toyota Way during a layover. The format: everyone presents for three minutes, slides only, no code, no screen-share of an actually-running thing, because Malte has strong feelings about “the tyranny of the literal.” The slides are gorgeous. Magnus from growth presents a funnel chart whose lines ascend with the confidence of a central bank, and when Ines asks what the y-axis represents, Magnus stares at the slide for what feels like a full twelve seconds before saying, “user value.” Ines says, “user value in what units.” Magnus says, “Gemini made it.” The room nods. The nodding room...