# Patrick Ma

![Patrick Ma](/resources/cognition/portraits/patrick-ma.webp)

Building Cognition | AI Engineering  
Cognition  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Jun 2026
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Software Engineer (L5), Quora
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Quora (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy
- X: @mapeiyuan
- GitHub: https://github.com/mapy1874
- Website: https://patrickma.org/
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes

I watched him type decades' worth of notes by hand and built the AI solution that saves him 1400+ hours of mundane work. 

Maybe the future of FDE is not only for enterprise teams but also for personal software that makes the experts around us 10x faster.

He is a doctor with 30+ years of experience. I watched him manually type decades of notes into Word docs.

So I built him AI software that has now saved him 1,400+ hours." (https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2068762769172918505)
- Linkedin post, verbatim: "TIL Devin AI is an active account that would accept my connection request.

When would Cognition team use Devin to manage Devin’s social media account?" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_til-devin-ai-is-an-active-account-that-would-activity-7462887237232275456-p-av)
- Linkedin post, verbatim: "Since late 2025, I’ve written over 99% of my code with AI.

The surprising part isn’t just that the models improved; it’s that code is no longer the bottleneck. Instead, the human in the loop has become the constraint, facing challenges such as: 
- Command approvals fatigue.
- Waiting for the current agent to finish edits before starting a new task.
- Deciding the next steps for the agent.

This " (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_my-tools-for-writing-99-of-code-with-ai-activity-7436924033876619264-yKLY)
- Public headline says "Building Cognition | AI Engineering". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy)
- X post, verbatim: "Very cool team. Highly recommended" (https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2057118956037820765)
- X post, verbatim: "WRONG mandarin transcription is just wrong “不冷犯错”  means “not cold, make mistake” in Chinese" (https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2054421218829455683)
- X post, verbatim: "This will become the "Design Twitter" of  system design interviews in the AI era" (https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2053268074451906654)
- Linkedin post, verbatim: "I filed my US-Canada cross-border taxes with Claude Code this week.

Within hours, it gathered my tricky tax situation, pulled my travel history from gmail, determined I was a nonresident alien, read both treaties, and found thousands in dividends I didn't owe tax on.

Everything was great until I asked it to fill in the PDF forms: checkboxes kept corrupting, overwriting existing fields. I ended u" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_i-filed-my-us-canada-cross-border-taxes-with-activity-7451093762895966208-r3ns)
- X post, verbatim: "This is huge. I can finally use Gemini with a great agent harness now." (https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2039822534561198527)
- Linkedin post, verbatim: "My toy repo now has more reviewers than most of the PRs I shipped at Quora.

This screenshot is from one of my personal projects. These 5 AI reviewers surfaced more meaningful insights than I would typically have gotten from an average human review.

AI makes code cheaper to produce, so the bottleneck shifts to verification. Once you can add reviewers without adding headcount, the workflow starts " (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_my-toy-repo-now-has-more-reviewers-than-most-activity-7439472221087215617-BZ4u)
- X post, verbatim: "My 100-engineer company: At most 2 serious human comments per PR… the rest is just "LGTM".

My personal side project without paying $15 per review: https://t.co/eXAss7nY5y" (https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2033582948293968111, https://t.co/eXAss7nY5y)
- X post, verbatim: "Once coding agents get good enough, the bottleneck stops being code.

It becomes you.

A thread on the stack I’m using to keep agents unblocked, self-testing, and reviewable:" (https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2031025460231209048)
- Linkedin post, verbatim: "Vibe coding gave me a sore throat.

I'm a slow typer. So I use speech-to-text to keep up with 5 AI agents at once.

Turns out when you can type as fast as you think, you don't stop talking.

My throat hurts. My API credits hurt more.

Typeless should add a warning label for vibe coders" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_vibe-coding-gave-me-a-sore-throat-im-a-activity-7419529416298582016-ah0l)
- Generalist engineer. AI Agents, iOS, full-stack, system reliability; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy)
- Patrick Ma wrote "99%+ of my code with AI since late 2025", shipping prototypes and production code at Quora and Poe to hundreds of millions of monthly users. (https://patrickma.org/blog/ai-tools-mar-2026)
- Previous roles include Software Engineer (L5) at Quora; Software Engineer (L3/L4) at Quora; Venture Scout at UpHonest Capital; Software Engineer at Renaissance Computing Institute; Software Engineer at Credit Suisse; Research Assistant at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy)
- Education history includes Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Statistics and Analytics, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Mechatronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy)
- Patrick Ma was the initial champion for Claude Code usage inside Quora, writing "As the initial champion for Claude Code usage inside Quora, I immediately recognized that this was something agents could help with." (https://patrickma.org/blog/forward-deployed-personal-software)
- Patrick Ma is a Member of Technical Staff at Cognition, where he is "Building Devin Fusion in Singapore". (https://www.delphi.co/patrick-ma)
- Patrick Ma was a Software Engineer (L5) at Quora, where he "Built coding and computer-use agents for Poe". (https://www.delphi.co/patrick-ma)
- Patrick Ma uses Claude Code CLI as his "daily driver during full-time work" because he is on a remote devbox with no GUI. (https://patrickma.org/blog/ai-tools-mar-2026)
- Patrick Ma uses Conductor to run multiple Claude Code agents in parallel on side projects, saying "I've had three agents ship three separate features before I finished my morning coffee." (https://patrickma.org/blog/ai-tools-mar-2026)
- Patrick Ma argues the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to the human: "the bottleneck used to be writing code. Now it's you." (https://patrickma.org/blog/ai-tools-mar-2026)
- Patrick Ma's usage of Codex surged after the macOS app launch on February 2, and his "Codex vs Claude Code usage is roughly 50-50 now." (https://patrickma.org/blog/ai-tools-mar-2026)
- Patrick Ma's AI-written code share "was already 80%+ by summer 2025, months before most teams started taking agentic coding seriously." (https://patrickma.org/blog/ai-tools-mar-2026)
- Patrick Ma picked Gemini 3 Pro as the initial OCR model and coded a version hosted on Cloudflare. (https://patrickma.org/blog/forward-deployed-personal-software)
- Patrick Ma migrated the whole backend infra to AWS Hong Kong after Cloudflare upload reliability was poor due to Chinese regulations and Japan-only hosting. (https://patrickma.org/blog/forward-deployed-personal-software)
- Patrick Ma built a review queue feature for the OCR app, crediting his Quora work experience: "My work experience at Quora helped me translate his needs into this review queue pattern quickly." (https://patrickma.org/blog/forward-deployed-personal-software)
- Patrick Ma's AI assistant runs the Claude Agent SDK inside an E2B sandbox, copying selected markdown documents into the sandbox and letting the agent use tools like Grep and Read with streamed tool traces. (https://patrickma.org/blog/forward-deployed-personal-software)
- Patrick Ma's app processed 7000+ images, producing about 5.4 million Chinese characters of text across 50+ TCM books and notes. (https://patrickma.org/blog/forward-deployed-personal-software)
- Patrick Ma was a Software Engineer (L5) at Quora, where he "Grew Quora ad revenue by cutting fraud". (https://www.delphi.co/patrick-ma)
- Patrick Ma is a Venture Scout at CRV, where he helps "Invest in pre-seed and seed-stage startups". (https://www.delphi.co/patrick-ma)
- Patrick Ma says he writes "over 99% of my code with AI" for AI-assisted coding. (https://www.delphi.co/patrick-ma)
- Patrick Ma describes himself: "I build agents and invest in early-stage startups." (https://www.delphi.co/patrick-ma)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition - Singapore, Singapore (Jun 2026 - Present): Devin Fusion
- Venture Scout at CRV - Singapore (Jun 2026 - Present): I invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies. Let’s connect if your are building something cool.
- Software Engineer (L5) at Quora (Dec 2024 - Jun 2026): Poe ML team
My work spans AI engineering, full stack, agent infrastructure, agent security, and AI-enabled dev velocity 

Building vibe coding agent and preventing it from saying "You're absolutely right"
Advising the engineering org’s AI adoption 
Engineering computer use agents
AI Group Chat
- Software Engineer (L5) at Quora (Apr 2024 - Dec 2024): Poe iOS Product/Platform 

iOS reliability, speed, dev velocity
AI features: Previews, LLM parameter control
- Software Engineer (L3/L4) at Quora (Mar 2022 - Apr 2024): Poe iOS Product/Platform 

Worked on Poe iOS Core Product & Monetization & Platform

Monetization Products

Increased revenue by reducing ads fraud, expanding programmatic ads footprint
Improved user engagement via tuning ads selection, polishing ads consumer experience
Enhanced ads system reliability as the team reliability DRI, led multiple system quality improvements in programmatic ads integration, ads selection
- Venture Scout at UpHonest Capital (Aug 2024 - May 2026): Sourced $1M+ deals for the firm
- Software Engineer at Renaissance Computing Institute - Chapel Hill, NC (Apr 2021 - Dec 2021): Optimized internal SOPs system
- Software Engineer at Credit Suisse - Morrisville, NC (May 2021 - Aug 2021): Credit eTrading
Oh Credit Default Swap
- Research Assistant at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Chapel Hill, NC (Jan 2020 - Jan 2020): Eye-tracking for People with ALS

Developed a low-cost eye-tracking solution helping people with ALS interact with websites using eyes

## Education
- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Statistics and Analytics: Phi Beta Kappa
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology - Mechatronics: Rank 1/355
Transferred out
National Scholarship of China (top 1%)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan
- https://patrickma.org/blog/ai-tools-mar-2026
- https://patrickma.org/blog/forward-deployed-personal-software
- https://www.delphi.co/patrick-ma
- https://www.distractify.com/p/patrick-ma-ai-agents
- https://aijourn.com/patrick-ma-is-building-ai-agents-that-let-more-people-create-software/
- https://www.aiagiai.com/en/29829.html
- https://patrickma.org/talks/icml-2025-agents.pdf
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapy?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAClGmhEBr5cJEyzfTnRqokIBRUedXTC4UN8
- https://api.github.com/users/mapy1874
- https://patrickma.org/
- https://github.com/mapy1874
- https://github.com/mapy1874?tab=repositories
- https://patrickma.org/blog
- https://api.github.com/users/mapy1874/repos?per_page=100&sort=updated
- https://lnkd.in/gKD2QTrY
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2068762769172918505
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_til-devin-ai-is-an-active-account-that-would-activity-7462887237232275456-p-av
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_my-tools-for-writing-99-of-code-with-ai-activity-7436924033876619264-yKLY
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2057118956037820765
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2054421218829455683
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2053268074451906654
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_i-filed-my-us-canada-cross-border-taxes-with-activity-7451093762895966208-r3ns
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2039822534561198527
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_my-toy-repo-now-has-more-reviewers-than-most-activity-7439472221087215617-BZ4u
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2033582948293968111
- https://t.co/eXAss7nY5y
- https://x.com/mapeiyuan/status/2031025460231209048
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mapy_vibe-coding-gave-me-a-sore-throat-im-a-activity-7419529416298582016-ah0l


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