Anders Lie

Anders Lie
Occupation	Software engineer, entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder and CTO of Magnitude
Education	Iowa State University (B.S. Computer Science and Applied Mathematics)

Anders Lie is a software engineer and entrepreneur who is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Magnitude, an open-source coding agent. Magnitude was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Early career

Lie holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Iowa State University. From July 2022 to August 2023, he worked as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, where he contributed to identity management for low-code services. He subsequently founded Lie Software, a consultancy operating from September 2023 to December 2024 that built web application MVPs and AI integrations for startup clients. During this period, he also served as Chief Technology Officer at a stealth startup from March 2024 to July 2024. In August 2024, Lie founded Langur, a project focused on improving the development of large language model agents, which he operated until December 2024.

Magnitude

In January 2025, Lie co-founded Magnitude alongside Tom Greenwald. The company develops an open-source coding agent designed to follow developer intent more reliably, remain effective on longer tasks, and produce higher-quality code. Magnitude is available as a command-line tool installable via npm.

Magnitude's core architecture is based on what the company calls "subagent driven development." Rather than relying on a single agent to handle all coding tasks, the system delegates work to specialized subagents — for planning, code review, debugging, and web browsing — while a main agent maintains focus on the user's overall intent. This approach is intended to prevent degradation in performance during longer or more complex coding sessions. The subagents are equipped with toolsets scoped to their specific roles, and they can surface blockers, ask clarifying questions, or be paused and redirected during execution.

The tool is model-agnostic and runs locally, supporting a range of AI model providers including Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Cerebras, Vercel, Qwen, Copilot, and Ollama. Users can mix models across different tasks — for example, using one model for conversational interaction and another for code generation.

Magnitude is categorized within the artificial intelligence, developer tools, open source, and infrastructure sectors. The company's source code is available on GitHub.