For onboarding

Get new engineers shipping in days, not months.

The senior who's supposed to onboard them is in an incident. The wiki is stale. Their first week is full of meetings recapping things half the team has forgotten. Cognia replaces the wiki with the actual context, queryable.

cogniahq.tech /agent
ask Cognia:Why does the migration job retry six times instead of three?
Bumped from 3 to 6 in PR #1244 after the August incident. The Postgres connection pool was hitting transient timeouts under load; 3 retries dropped the success rate below 95%. Six was empirical: 6 retries cleared 99.4% of timeouts.
1PR #1244 fix(jobs): 3->6 retriesGitHub, 2026-08-22
2August outage post-mortemNotion, post-mortem-2026-08
3marco proposed retry bumpSlack #engineering, 2026-08-19

The pain

01 / pain

Onboarding eats senior time you can't get back

Two weeks of paired sessions. Ten 'walk me through the system' meetings. The senior who's good at it is also the one shipping the most. Tax shows up everywhere.

02 / pain

The wiki tells you how things work, not why

The new hire reads the architecture diagram and is no closer to knowing why you swallow that one error or why the staging cluster is a quarter behind. Those are in Slack threads from August.

03 / pain

First PRs are slow because context is missing

The new hire pings the channel for every minor decision. They make a small mistake the wiki would have warned about, if the wiki had been updated, which it wasn't.

How Cognia helps

02 / how

Shadow standups with citations

Day 2-4, the new hire sits in standups with Cognia open. When someone says 'remember the migration?', they search it in real time. They build the index in their head.

03 / how

First PR ships day 3

A real ticket from the backlog. The new hire searches the memory layer for context, pings the team only when memory doesn't answer. PR ships, reviewers leave normal comments.

04 / how

Day 4: they capture their own confusion

Two paragraphs and three citations on what was hard. That doc gets ingested. The next person who joins finds it first. Onboarding gets better automatically.

4 days
from start to shipping their first PR
0
scheduled 'walk me through' meetings
Self-improving
every new hire's confusion becomes searchable

What it looks like

A real question, a real answer, real citations into the artefacts that mattered. Click any citation to land at the exact source span.

cogniahq.tech /agent
ask Cognia:Why does the migration job retry six times instead of three?
Bumped from 3 to 6 in PR #1244 after the August incident. The Postgres connection pool was hitting transient timeouts under load; 3 retries dropped the success rate below 95%. Six was empirical: 6 retries cleared 99.4% of timeouts.
1PR #1244 fix(jobs): 3->6 retriesGitHub, 2026-08-22
2August outage post-mortemNotion, post-mortem-2026-08
3marco proposed retry bumpSlack #engineering, 2026-08-19

Read more

© 2026 Cognia, Inc.
Cognia for engineering onboarding — Cognia · Cognia