Founder and CTO
Building Cognyx to help manufacturers design hardware at software speed, bringing software rigor, versioning habits, collaboration models, and AI-assisted workflows into AI-era hardware engineering.
deonvdv
Deon van der Vyver
Founder/CTO of Cognyx. Building AI-assisted hardware engineering workflows and exploring how knowledge, reasoning, and automation come together in complex systems.
Work
What I've built and what I'm building now.
Agentic engineering
Designing software delivery systems that turn project context into plans, code, reviews, and production workflows, with human approval at the right decision points.
Continuous compliance
Building compliance workflows that keep policies, controls, evidence, and operational decisions connected so organizations can understand risk and act with accountability.
Research
Questions I’m Exploring
I’m interested in systems that can represent knowledge, reason about it, and safely act on it.
Some of the questions I keep returning to:
Knowledge
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How should organizational knowledge be represented so that both humans and AI systems can reason about it?
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Where do knowledge graphs and ontologies provide advantages over unstructured information?
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How can institutional knowledge remain accurate as organizations evolve?
Reasoning
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What context does an AI system need to make reliable decisions?
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How should humans and AI systems share responsibility for decision making?
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How do we evaluate systems that operate over long-running workflows rather than isolated tasks?
Action
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How autonomous should a system be before a human must approve its work?
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Can AI safely operate production systems such as software delivery pipelines and Kubernetes environments?
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What does accountability look like when decisions are distributed between humans and agents?
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How do we build systems that are observable, trustworthy, and governable in production?
About me
Building systems that help organizations manage complexity
I’ve spent much of my career building systems that help organizations manage complexity.
My background spans mobile advertising, digital media, education, cloud infrastructure, manufacturing, and AI. Across these domains, I’ve worked on problems involving large-scale data, distributed systems, knowledge representation, automation, and operational decision-making.
Today, I focus on systems that help organizations turn knowledge into decisions and decisions into action. My work explores how intelligent systems can support human judgment, automate complex workflows, and operate reliably in production environments.