Compounding Engineering with Claude Code

The name is a nod to compound interest: small gains that add up over time. Compounding Engineering applies this to software development. Every solved problem should make the next one easier. The term was coined by Kieran Klaassen at Every and popularized by Dan Shipper ¹. Every is a 15-person media company whose developers reportedly write almost no code themselves anymore, instead steering AI agents².

Every has released a Claude Code plugin for this. The core: A /compound command spawns six agents in parallel that capture what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how it was fixed. The result is stored as searchable documentation in the project, a kind of memory for recurring problems.

People forget to document, especially once a problem is solved. An agent handles this automatically.

This strikes a chord. Compounding Engineering makes reflection part of the work itself. That’s where you need to be to continuously improve how you work with the agent.