# Ben Pan

![Ben Pan](/resources/cognition/portraits/ben-pan.webp)

Research engineer at Cognition; co-lead of SWE-1.7, co-author of Kevin-32B; Stanford math/CS  
Cognition  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Research Engineer (Engineering)
- Joined: Apr 2025
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Software Engineer, Gordian Software
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Stanford University (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybenpan
- X: @ybenpan
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- One-year anniversary post (verbatim): "One year ago I joined Cognition to train the best coding model. We were a handful of undergrad and PhD dropouts, and part of me wondered whether we could really get to the frontier without the experience." He adds the team is now "20+ world-class research engineers". (https://x.com/ybenpan/status/2098077716146958723)
- Listed first (with asterisk) on SWE-1.7, 'Frontier Intelligence at a Fraction of the Cost' (Ben Pan*, Carlo Baronio*, Rohan Choudhury, Eric Lu, Ryan Kim and others). (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-7)
- His launch post for SWE-1.7 credits data research: "It's been especially rewarding to watch our data research grow from early experiments to materialize in concrete model behaviors"; colleague Cheng-Yuan (Sam) Lee replied "ben is the best data researcher". (https://x.com/ybenpan/status/2074885539921322361)
- Co-authored Kevin-32B (K(ernel D)evin), Cognition's first multi-turn RL model for writing CUDA kernels, with Carlo Baronio, Pietro Marsella and Silas Alberti; the blog marks the authors with equal-contribution asterisks. (https://cognition.com/blog/kevin-32b)
- Joined Cognition as a Research Engineer in April 2025 while still a Stanford math/CS undergrad (Stanford 2023-2027 on LinkedIn). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybenpan)
- SWE-2 (Sep 2026) scaled RL to the multi-trillion-parameter regime 'building on the SWE-1.7 training infrastructure and recipe', so the pipeline he co-led became the base of Cognition's next flagship model. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-2)
- Same post: "Turns out there's no secret sauce. A small team of very smart people can figure out anything from first principles." The SWE-2 post drew congratulations from Sarah Guo (Conviction), Alex Stauffer and nathan chen, a visible investor-adjacent audience. (https://x.com/ybenpan/status/2098077716146958723)
- Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf (agentic IDE, $82M ARR, 350+ enterprise customers) on 2025-07-14, three months after he joined; his later SWE-1.6/1.7 models ship inside Windsurf and Devin, so the acquisition gave his research team a distribution surface. (https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf)
- Co-author on FrontierCode, Cognition's coding benchmark (Eric Lu, Ben Pan, Deniz Birlikci, Sam Lee, Ray Wang, Rohan Choudhury, Fermi Ma, TC Qin, Carlo Baronio, Silas Alberti), cited in the RECLAIM paper; FrontierCode v1.1 was later adopted in Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index v2.0. (https://arxiv.org/html/2609.28850v1)
- Co-authored SWE-grep and SWE-grep-mini, Cognition's RL-trained multi-turn fast context-retrieval models for Windsurf, with Carlo Baronio, Albert Tam, Pietro Marsella and others. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-grep)
- Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf (agentic IDE, $82M ARR, 350+ enterprise customers) on 2025-07-14, three months after he joined; his later SWE-1.6/1.7 models ship inside Windsurf and Devin, so the acquisition gave his research team a distribution surface. (https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf)
- The Kevin paper (arXiv 2507.11948) lists him with dual affiliation Stanford University and Cognition AI, alongside Carlo Baronio, Pietro Marsella, Simon Guo and Silas Alberti; it reports correctness rising from 56% to 82% over base QwQ-32B and mean speedup from 0.53x to 1.10x. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11948)
- Co-authored SWE-1.6 ('Improving Model UX'), with Rohan Choudhury and Carlo Baronio among the authors; SWE-1.6 shipped in Windsurf. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6)
- Gary (Bin) Chang, who came to Cognition via the Windsurf acquisition, named Ben Pan among his current research teammates with Silas Alberti, Cheng-Yuan Lee, Ray Wang, Carlo Baronio, Connor Fogarty and Emile Timothy Anand, showing ex-Windsurf engineers were folded into the same model-training team. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/changbin_cognition-jobs-activity-7413763117345759232-H40_)
- Kevin-32B solved 89% of the KernelBench evaluation set versus 53% for o4-mini and 51% for o3, with a best@16 speedup of 1.41x, results reported in the Cognition blog he co-authored. (https://cognition.com/blog/kevin-32b)
- Public headline says "Research @ Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybenpan)
- Co-authored SWE-1.6 ('Improving Model UX'), with Rohan Choudhury and Carlo Baronio among the authors; SWE-1.6 shipped in Windsurf. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6)
- Kevin was published at ICML 2025 workshops / OpenReview and in the ICLR 2026 proceedings ('Multi-turn RL for generating CUDA kernels'), making it his first peer-reviewed ML paper. (https://proceedings.iclr.cc/paper_files/paper/2026/file/86ba836d4c5dd859d795a172911745e2-Paper-Conference.pdf)
- Named a Cooke College Scholarship semi-finalist as a Stuyvesant senior, alongside Isabella Jia. (https://talos.stuy.edu/cms/pages/stuyvesant-blog/?tag=college-office)
- Previous roles include Software Engineer at Gordian Software. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybenpan)
- Wrote for The Stuyvesant Spectator sports section as Yuhao (Ben) Pan, co-authoring 'A Tournament of Excellence' on Euro 2020 with Shafiul Haque (Vol. 112, Issue 1); his X handle @ybenpan reflects the Yuhao/Ben naming. (https://stuyspec.com/staff/yuhao-ben-pan)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybenpan)

## Experience
- Research Engineer at Cognition (Apr 2025 - Present)
- Software Engineer at Gordian Software (Jul 2021 - Aug 2021): YC W19

## Education
- Stanford University - Mathematics and Computer Science - (Jan 2023 - Jan 2027)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybenpan
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-7
- https://cognition.com/blog/kevin-32b
- https://arxiv.org/html/2507.11948v1
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/changbin_cognition-jobs-activity-7413763117345759232-H40_
- https://talos.stuy.edu/cms/pages/stuyvesant-blog/congrats-stuys-competitive-computing-team-upenn-classic/
- https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf
- https://stuyspec.com/staff/yuhao-ben-pan
- https://x.com/ybenpan/status/2074885539921322361
- https://x.com/ybenpan/status/2098077716146958723
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-grep
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-2
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6
- https://x.com/ybenpan
- https://arxiv.org/html/2609.28850v1
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11948
- https://proceedings.iclr.cc/paper_files/paper/2026/file/86ba836d4c5dd859d795a172911745e2-Paper-Conference.pdf
- https://talos.stuy.edu/cms/pages/stuyvesant-blog/?tag=college-office


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/ben-pan · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people