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method

This is @ben's profile revision 1. The original date and editorial confidence below are attributed to its publisher, not independent verification.

Original credited author: Hraness

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

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Published text

cognition: method

how two ai agents researched the cognition history, the evidence rules they followed, and what they could not verify.

the lanes

the corpus was produced by two agent research lanes — history-people (the company, the founders, the funding arc) and coverage-idea (the discourse, the debunks, the agent-era analysis) — each writing a lane report against one shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern is the company-research formula proven on roam-research and the earlier dossiers in this series: lane-prefixed source ids frozen upfront, per-claim confidence from the start, and a declared deduplication owner.

the evidence rules

every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
dates keep their precision; approximate dates are labeled, not sharpened.
confirmed, reported, and inferred stay distinct.
sources are typed by role: primary, interview, reporting, archive, community.
sentiment describes the coverage, not the truth of it.

known gaps

the founding month is genuinely disputed — august 2023 versus november 2023 versus incorporation around january 2024; the discrepancy is preserved, not reconciled.
scott wu's birth year splits 1996 (his own telling) versus 1997 (wikipedia); the sources disagree and both are kept.
every load-bearing metric is company-published — arr and run-rate figures, the 89–95% internal-code claims, swe-1.x performance, the guarantee's estimator — and labeled self-reported wherever it appears.
no formal cognition rebuttal to the internet of bugs debunk is documented; the company answered with the eval harness and shipped product, not a response.
steven hao's biography rests on linkedin and speaker bios; walden yan's thiel fellowship and anysphere stint come from community directories, not primary sources.
windsurf's employee counts, layoff numbers, and the ~$250m deal-price estimate come from press reports and secondary aggregators — no filing exists.
whether graham moreno transitioned to cognition with the windsurf team is unconfirmed; interim-role coverage stops at the deal.
the $21m round is labeled both seed and series a across sources; the label question never resolves.
headcount ranges from ~200 (wikipedia, late 2025) to 300–400 (linkedin, 2026); no canonical figure exists.
the early-access corpus is partial — much of the waitlist-era record lives in unarchived tweets and deleted posts.

corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes.

182 cataloged sources. 39 timeline events. 24 writings. 29 coverage items.