Claude Code took 0.1s, Cursor CLI 19s

you can try the https://playground.cognition.ai/ here

i wrote a longer explainer here https://x.com/swyx/status/1978874342743343254 but saving you the click

this was a perspective cut from the blogpost, but let me explain why subagents kill long context

Like you can spend $500m building 100 million context models, and they would be 1) slow, 2) expensive to use, 3) have huge context rot. O(n) is the lower bound.

Cog's approach is something you learn in day 1 of CS50 - divide and parallelize. Embeddings are too dumb, Agentic Search is too slow. So train limited-agency (max 4 turns), natively parallel tool calling (avg parallelism of 7-8, custom toolset) fast (2800tok/s) subagents to give the performance of Agentic Search under an acceptable "Flow Window" that feels immaterially slower than Embeddings.

The benefit of this is threefold:

- 8 ^ 4 toolcalls cover a very large code search space. can compound subagent calls if more needed.

- predictable cost & end to end latency

- subagent outputs "clean" contexts, free of context failure modes like context poisoning and context rot

we originally called this Rapid Agentic Search, to contrast with RAG. but Fast Context rolls off the tongue better.

-- Second perspective --

The Fundamental Equation of Coding Agents is:

Coding Agent Performance = Ability to Read the Right Files * Ability to Generate the Right Diffs

Fast Context is Cognition's first solution for the Read. As codebases get larger and and tasks get more complex, Reads get more important. the average production codebase first query in Cascade is >60% just searching and reading files.

But if this were just about speed, it might not be that exciting. I think there are unappreciated effects in performance as well when you have very good context. In other words:

Context Engineering is Actually Very Important. Too important for humans and hardcoded rules.

The swe-greps are the first dedicated context engineer agent models.

I also enjoyed the tech write-up. It's good to see REAL substantial engineering like this which is both highly impressive and highly productized.