# How Cogent builds AI agents that have to be right every single time | Geng Sng (Co-founder & CTO - Cogent)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/max-agency-7807113/how-cogent-builds-ai-agents-that-have-to-be-right-every-single-time-geng-sng-co-founder-cto-cogent
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/max-agency-7807113/how-cogent-builds-ai-agents-that-have-to-be-right-every-single-time-geng-sng-co-founder-cto-cogent.md
Podcast: [Max Agency](https://stenobird.com/podcast/max-agency-7807113)
Published: 2026-05-22T14:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/supermix2/episodes/How-Cogent-builds-AI-agents-that-have-to-be-right-every-single-time--Geng-Sng-Co-founder--CTO---Cogent-e3jnoad
Audio file: https://anchor.fm/s/1112ba400/podcast/play/120364813/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-4-22%2F424661959-44100-2-5d1e31fb98441.mp3
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Duration seconds: 4497

## Resource

Geng Sng is co-founder and CTO of Cogent, which builds autonomous agents that remediate vulnerabilities for enterprise security teams. Today, Cogent's agents process billions of security events per day, maintaining a live context graph of every asset and vulnerability across customer environments. In this conversation, Geng walks through Cogent's hot vs cold context split, the sub-agents that handle side quests, and the two graphs they run in parallel. – We also discuss: Why defensive security is harder for AI than offensive Under the hood of Cogent's three agents Inside Cogent's “read only” by-default sandboxes Why graph databases don't scale for security data Cogent Research and the move into formal verification Why interactive agents need a deeper planning phase to one-shot – Referenced: Abnormal AI Amazon S3 Anthropic Bash ChatGPT Claude Code Claude Mythos CodeMender Codex Cogent Cursor Google DeepMind GPT-5.5-Cyber Jupyter Letta Mozilla OpenAI Opus 4.6 Opus 4.7 Vercel – Where to find Geng: LinkedIn – Where to find Harrison: LinkedIn Twitter/X – Where to find LangChain: Website Docs – Send feedback or questions to maxagency@langchain.dev – Timestamps: (00:00) Why mean time to exploit collapsed from years to minutes (02:08) Inside Cogent's Agent Lake architecture (05:11) Why Cogent rejected graph databases (10:48) The trust ladder before agents touch production (15:13) The three types of agents inside Cogent (17:07) How Cogent sandboxes its agents (19:16) Short-circuiting interactive agents with a deeper planning phase (24:31) What to do when users believe agents too much (31:21) Why sub-agents let agents go on side quests (34:59) Two-tiered evals and the metric that catches bad prompts (40:00) Cogent’s unique approach to context (48:39) Cogent Research and the move…

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