Attention Engineering

Attention Engineering is launching Coast, a Mac app that runs continuously in the background and records what you do on screen so that both you and your AI agents can recall it later. The pitch behind this launch is that knowledge work like underwriting, billing, and logistics happens in pixels for eight hours a day and then vanishes, while coding became the first job to get seriously automated because it left behind millions of public repositories to learn from. Coast is an attempt to capture that same kind of training signal for everything else, starting with a local preview that keeps the data on the user's device. The product is aimed at productivity-focused professionals who already invest in structuring their digital work, from engineers to product managers, and who want an assistant that can answer questions about what they saw or did without being re-briefed each time. The company frames the underlying bet as "next action prediction," meaning a model that watches long enough to anticipate the follow-up email, the summary, or the routine task at the moment it becomes useful, rather than waiting for a prompt. Attention Engineering was founded in 2025 by Aidan Guo and Julian Windeck, and is based in the Bay Area. The company raised a $1.25M pre-seed round earlier this year from investors including Village Global, with Guo (a Carnegie Mellon dropout who previously built sneaker bots) handling product and Windeck contributing a distributed systems background. This launch matters because it turns that thesis into a downloadable artifact, giving founders and operators a concrete way to test whether an always-on personal recorder is useful enough, and private enough by staying local, to earn a permanent spot on their machine.