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.”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.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.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]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]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 is a Cogentiv specialty. Priya from platform presents an architecture diagram so dense, so confidently arrowed, that it could pass for something out of an actual distributed-systems textbook. Someone asks her what the box in the middle does. “It’s the orchestrator,” she says. Someone asks what the orchestrator orchestrates. Priya considers the slide as though meeting it for the first time. “The,” she says, “the other boxes.” Malte stands up at the end and says this is the best sprint review he has ever attended in his life. We applaud. We applaud like people who’ve forgotten what applause is for. [illusion of competence, at ensemble scale]I want to tell you about Tuesday.Tuesday I was assigned a spec for a thing. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember what the thing was, which is part of the story. [cognitive debt, compounding; the ownership that never formed] My manager Ines Slacked me the Linear ticket at 9:14. By 9:19 I’d pasted the ticket into Claude and was watching it produce a document of considerable fluency and unclear relationship to reality. By 9:47 I had a PR open. By 10:02 the PR was merged. By 10:03 I couldn’t have told you, under oath, what the PR did. I’d read it; I’d even left two comments on it, performing the motions of scrutiny the way an actor mouths along to a playback track. [

metacognitive laziness] The whole thing had passed through me the way a language you once spoke passes through you when you overhear it at an airport: you recognize the shape, you can’t hold the meaning, and afterward you’re less sure of something you can’t name. [the illusion of competence, experienced from the inside]“Shipped,” I typed in the standup channel, followed by the little rocket emoji that is our shared rite of completion.Jarek replied with a flame emoji. Jarek hasn’t produced a non-emoji utterance in eleven days.I should tell you about the rest of Tuesday, because Tuesday I learned an important word. After shipping the thing I couldn’t remember, I spent four more hours in the agent loop: reviewing diffs, approving suggestions, spawning follow-up tasks, alt-tabbing between three context windows and a Slack thread that was moving faster than I could parse. By 3pm the buzzing had started — behind the eyes, a slight ringing, the specific fog of having made three hundred micro-decisions about output I hadn’t produced. I went to the bathroom, sat in a stall, and read an HBR article about something called brain fry on my phone, and thought: ah. That’s the word for this. [brain fry, in its somatic glory]Wednesday afternoon, Ines pinged me. “Hey,” she wrote (the deceptively soft opener that precedes all German professional violence), “quick question about the thing you shipped Tuesday.” I stared at the message. I’d shipped something. I had no idea what. [cognitive debt, compounding]It turned out I’d shipped a notification service on top of something Jarek had shipped at four in the morning, which had been written by Jarek’s orchestrator agent spawning three subagents in fresh context windows, which Jarek hadn’t read (he’d approved the diff with a single 👍 at 04:17, the ninth such 👍 that week, the diffs scrolling past faster than the human visual cortex can process [automation complacency, late-stage]), which had itself been predicated on a spec that Malte had dictated to ChatGPT during a sauna session in Prenzlauer Berg and then forwarded to Ines with the note pls operationalize 🚀. [

workslop, flowing downhill as workslop does]The result: every customer in the staging environment had received fourteen hundred emails overnight, each one a perfectly formatted, contextually appropriate notification about an event that hadn’t happened yet. The emails were, Ines noted with the air of someone trying very hard to find the silver lining, beautifully written.Nobody on the chain could explain why any of it was the way it was. Three humans, zero scrutiny, each one trusting that the person upstream had checked. Nobody upstream had checked. At Cogentiv, trust in the tool is a performance metric. [cognitive surrender, systemic; the chain didn’t break because nobody in it was pulling] Ines said, with the flatness of someone who’s just understood something she’d rather not have, “We have … I think we have an intent debt issue.” [intent debt, named in the wild]I sat through the all-hands, during which Malte unveiled our Q3 thesis (“Agent-Native Everything”), during which he said the phrase “we are reclaiming the sacred dignity of the prompt,” during which he cited, as inspiration, a tweet by a seventeen-year-old in Palo Alto. I drifted through the catered afterparty in our “collision space” (a former Kreuzberg print shop where Malte had commissioned a neon sign reading MOVE THOUGHTFULLY AND COMPOUND THINGS), where the signature cocktails were named after failed YC batches (the W19 was a negroni; the S22 was “whatever’s left”) and where Malte, by the canapés, told a circle of interns that he’d “basically stopped thinking in the traditional sense” sometime around March and had “never been more aligned.” [cognitive atrophy, reframed as enlightenment] On the U8 home I laughed, once, at nothing in particular. An older woman across the aisle looked at me the way one looks at a pigeon that has flown into a supermarket. The laugh, I realized afterward, had been closer in character to crying.Thursday I called in sick, which at Cogentiv is called “doing deep work from a non-standard environment.” I sat on my balcony with a Kaffee and tried, as an experiment, to think a thought without assistance.