Ship a major feature with a hospital-style pipeline of role-based agents

Cockroach Labs engineers Adam Storm and Rafi Shamim set up their coding agents like the staff of a teaching hospital. Each GitHub issue is a patient. A triage agent admits it, a fellow plans and writes the fix, a separate attending reviews the plan and the code, and a discharge agent checks every step before merge. A human chief steps in only when an agent can't find an answer in a log of past rulings. The first big test added IBM Db2 support to their migration tool, MOLT. It took under two days, with 27 merged PRs and a token bill of $4,172. Oracle support had taken nine months in 2024. After the first week, they made a human approve every merge.