The software industrial revolution: AI agents for enterprise development

Since the dawn of code, larger dev teams and larger codebases == slower progress. This is why enterprise software development is hard, expensive, and risky.

AI can’t automate all dev work, but AI is very good at automating the repetitive parts of coding. This is industrialization: breaking a complex process into 100 smaller tasks, then automating the soul-crushing parts and letting humans focus on the ones they’re good at. By industrializing software development, devs will move faster, not slower, as the codebase and team grow.

We believe AI coding agents are best suited to automate the repetitive, mind-numbing parts of enterprise software development, not to try (and fail) to replace humans. 

Today we’re announcing Sourcegraph’s AI coding agents for the enterprise:

• Code Review Agent + 4 other agents: Code Review Agents are available in the Early Access Program (EAP) via waitlist and serve as the ideal starting point for implementing other agents. Code Migration Agents, Testing Agents, Documentation Agents, and Notify Agents will be available in the coming months.
• Agent API (EAP): Build your own custom agents on the robust infrastructure that powers Sourcegraph's advanced agent ecosystem. API access will also be available via waitlist. 
• Auto-edit in the editor goes way beyond autocomplete with suggested edits in the current file and elsewhere based on recent edits and instant code review, testing, and documentation feedback from your agents.
• A unified experience for code search, chat, and agents in your editor, code review, on the web, and deeply integrated into your other dev tools, powered by a new agentic RAG layer for greater accuracy.

This is industrialized software development: accelerating human developers doing what they’re best at, and automating repetitive, soul-crushing tasks with AI. This goes far beyond AI copilots and, unlike other agents that claim to replace humans, it actually works and is in production in large enterprises today. 

Customers like Indeed are using agents in thousands of repos to increase code quality and reduce the overhead and delays associated with code reviews, automatically reviewing and providing feedback on more than 1000 merge requests each week. And Booking.com is investigating Sourcegraph agents for a critical software migration of legacy code, helping them save significant time on work that is projected to take years to complete by human devs across many teams. 

Sign up for early access to our agents and Agent API. Read on for our vision and stories from customers who are using Sourcegraph agents.

What is industrialized software development?

AI replacing human developers end-to-end doesn’t work (yet), especially in the enterprise. Coding agents that claim to replace humans are falling far short of expectations.

There’s something in between a coding assistant and a full human-replacement agent, though. In fact, the vision of humanoid robots taking over software development and replacing humans end-to-end is both unrealistic and unambitious. It's just taking what we do today, waving a magic wand, and saying a robot can do the same thing, perfectly, without any other changes to the whole system.

History shows industrial progress comes from humans and machines working together, not replacing one with the other. It’s been 250 years of man and machine working alongside each other. This changed everything about how goods were made, what goods were made, and how the entire world worked, in ways we could not have foreseen. And still, virtually all factories employ humans on the production line, working alongside specialized machines.

Agents like this—that reliably automate specific tasks—are a transformative technology, and they work today in enterprise codebases. They can streamline common dev bottlenecks in code review, testing, code migration, and more. You need to adopt them now, before your competitors do, and before your CEO asks why you haven’t yet.

Industrialized software development is here today. Our customers are already building agents on Sourcegraph, and the early results are causing teams to change how they think about software development:

• Booking.com: Their Code Review Agent will ensure Booking.com’s engineers are not only merging high-quality code with proper test coverage but are compliant with regulatory requirements.
• Indeed: Using automation with Sourcegraph’s CLI, and soon our Code Review Agent, to help catch major bugs, quality concerns, architectural issues, security vulnerabilities, performance problems, etc. These agents will save over 700 devs hundreds of hours of manual reviews and debugging, and potentially millions of dollars in costly mistakes.
• Priceline: Offloading the most repetitive tasks with Sourcegraph agents to triage bugs and ease the burden of knowing every moving part of the platform. Agents give access to all the dispersed knowledge base (Jira issues history, deployment history, code commits, built tools) to provide better guidance to Priceline engineers.
• We dogfood heavily at Sourcegraph, naturally. In the last 3 weeks, approximately 200 pull requests were reviewed by a Code Review Agent built by our Security team. The agent discovered 2 high-severity issues and 10 other problems before merge, saving Security Engineers an hour each day by prioritizing and triaging security reviews.

Jeff Davis, VP of Engineering at Indeed, the #1 job site in the world, uses Sourcegraph agents with 700+ devs:

“Indeed is making massive investments across the company in generative AI, both to improve internal operations and to provide better services to job seekers and employers. Sourcegraph’s agents are a key part of our strategy in multiple stages of the SDLC, and we’ve had a fantastic partnership with Sourcegraph in a joint effort to build automatic code review functionality.” 

Bruno Passos, AI Innovation Lead at Booking.com, the world’s largest travel company with 4000 devs:

“At Booking.com, devs using Sourcegraph daily in the IDE are merging 30%+ more PRs every month than devs who don’t use Sourcegraph at all. We’re now bringing this productivity boost to the rest of our SDLC with agents. We have a promising proof of concept migration agent that we anticipate will reduce one specific migration from 10+ years to months. The agents we’re building with Sourcegraph are helping us reimagine software development and have the potential to be “self-healing services” that eliminate tech debt at scale and ensure today’s code doesn’t become tomorrow’s legacy.”

Booking.com, Indeed, and Priceline have all been fantastic customers and close design partners for our Code Review and Code Migration Agents over the last 6 months. Today we’re making the Code Review Agent available in EAP for enterprises, and in the coming months, we’ll be shipping agents for code migrations, testing, documentation, and more.

Let the revolution begin

The AI-powered industrial revolution in software development has begun. What once held enterprises back—large-scale teams and codebases—is now their greatest advantage.

The future is clear: accelerate human devs doing what they’re best at, and automate the rest—the soul-crushing parts of software development. That’s what Sourcegraph lets every enterprise do, starting now.

Sign up now for early access to our agents and Agent API to help automate code review, code migration, testing, documentation, and more. Happy coding!