Case study

Cogent

A security product where agents find what matters, plan the fix, and ask before they act on your systems.

Role
Product design and front end
Scope
The whole product and its design system
Shipped
933 merged PRs · ~5,800 commits
Tested
About 3,050 test cases
One question, start to finish. The agent shows its homework before anyone asks for it. Real product, made-up servers.

01The product

Security teams have more to fix than time to read.

Cogent’s agents do the reading: they connect to a team’s tools, find what matters and propose the fix, and a person stays in charge of every change.

Here is the whole product, each area sized by the pull requests that shaped it. The ✻ areas are the six screens this story walks through.

Foundations939

  • Shared components397
  • Design system318
  • App shell112
  • Browser tests112

Knowledge Base601

  • Entities193
  • Zero Day82
  • Exposure78
  • Assets62
  • Findings52
  • Security assessment41
  • Vulnerabilities38
  • Recommendations30
  • Exploitability25

Agents414

Remediation398

Admin158

  • Settings and admin57
  • Users and roles55
  • Integrations46

Insights123

Bigger box, more pull requests, February to October 2026. Some PRs wander into several areas, so the boxes add up to more than 933.

Act I · Ask

A person asks; the agent answers and shows its work.

02Agent Chat

Answer first, then show the work.

Every answer leads with its conclusion. The queries, scripts and sources behind it open in How I know when you want them, and when the agent needs to change something, it stops and asks first.

Before it changes anything, the agent shows who can reach the host now and after. Approve, and it makes the change and checks it took.
How I know, opened: the SQL and Python behind an answerHow I know, opened: the SQL and Python behind an answer
How I know, opened: the receipts. Every query and script the agent ran, in plain view.

Act II · Work

The agent brings the work; a person makes the call.

03Investigations

One investigation at a time.

Agents open their own investigations and deal them as a deck, highest rating first. Each card says what’s going on, what happens if nothing is done and how hard it is to undo. Hand it off or ask the agent, and the next card comes up.

Deal the next card. Each write-up gives the short version first, then the plan, then the receipts.

04Action Queue

Then watch the fix land.

Every work item gets one status card: five stations, Cogent’s workspace saying what it’s doing right now, and the rollout rings underneath. A person starts each ring; Cogent runs it and checks it took.

Open the canary and it’s one host. Start it, and Cogent babysits the install and the scanner’s check, then taps you for the next ring.

Act III · Teach

Rules and routines, so the agent needs you less each week.

05Agent Policies

The agent drafts the rules; a person signs.

Four stages, from asset context to remediation. Cogent reads a team’s connected tools and drafts the rules it finds, each with its sources and what it would change. Nothing applies until a person adds it.

Cogent hands you five rules at a time. This one would raise about 210 assets to Critical, and it shows its three sources and its logic before you add it.

06Automations

A standing job, written as one sentence.

Automations read out loud: every weekday at nine, this agent does this and keeps the result here. Every underlined phrase is a picker, so there’s no form to learn.

Pick a starter and the sentence writes itself. Nudge the time, create it, run it now, and the briefing comes back with what it already did.

Act IV · See

Where you stand, read the way a person asks.

07Dashboard

What needs you first, then the numbers.

People open a dashboard with a question in mind, so it’s one page, read in the order they ask: what needs me, where do we stand, is it working, and which team carries the most.

Read it top to bottom: what needs you, what’s moving, whether it’s working. One switch re-reads the whole page for misconfigurations.

08Design system

Taste that scales with the team.

A whole team of engineers ships the product, so I built an internal Storybook: every foundation and component, live in light and dark and at both densities, with when to use it and what not to copy. It’s where I QA the system, and where engineers and their coding agents look before they build.

The internal design-system showcase in Cogent’s portal, open on Buttons: seven variants by three icon modes, each with its code nameThe internal design-system showcase in Cogent’s portal, open on Buttons: seven variants by three icon modes, each with its code name
Buttons in the showcase: every variant beside the code that makes it. The switches at the top flip the whole system between light and dark, Default and Compact.

09In their words

“Hyun is truly exceptional at his craft. He is deeply passionate about user experience and he creates incredible leverage across the team.”
Vineet Edupuganti, Co-founder & CEO, Cogent