GitLab Inc., known for delivering one of the most comprehensive and intelligent DevSecOps platforms, has officially announced the general availability of the GitLab Duo Agent Platform. With this launch, GitLab aims to move beyond basic AI-assisted coding and address deeper inefficiencies that slow down modern software delivery.
Over the past few years, AI-powered tools have significantly improved developers’ ability to write code faster. In fact, many teams report productivity gains of up to ten times during the coding phase. However, since developers typically spend only around 20% of their time writing code, the overall impact on innovation speed remains limited. This imbalance has become widely recognized as the “AI paradox” in software development. While coding accelerates, other stages of the lifecycle struggle to keep up.
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As a result, many organizations face growing bottlenecks. Faster code creation often leads to mounting backlogs in code reviews, increased security vulnerabilities, additional compliance checks, and more downstream bug fixes. Consequently, teams struggle to convert coding speed into real delivery velocity.
To solve this challenge, GitLab Duo Agent Platform introduces intelligent orchestration and agentic AI automation across the entire software development lifecycle. Importantly, it operates within an organization’s existing context, standards, and governance guardrails, ensuring AI actions remain aligned with internal policies.
With the general availability release, GitLab significantly expands its intelligent AI agent and orchestration capabilities. At the core is Agentic Chat, a context-aware assistant available across the GitLab Web UI and popular IDEs. It uses multi-step reasoning to answer complex questions and autonomously perform actions by drawing insights from issues, merge requests, pipelines, and security findings.
Agentic Chat supports multiple use cases. For analysis, it can create issues, epics, and merge requests while summarizing key insights and offering actionable guidance. From a coding perspective, it generates code, modernizes applications, fixes bugs, creates tests, and produces documentation across multiple languages and frameworks. Additionally, it helps teams understand, configure, and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines. On the security front, it explains vulnerabilities, prioritizes risks, and recommends fixes to save time and reduce exposure.
Beyond chat-based assistance, GitLab introduces Foundational Agents built by its experts. These include the Planner Agent, which helps teams structure and prioritize work, and the Security Analyst Agent, which reviews vulnerabilities and explains their impact in plain language. Moreover, organizations can create Custom Agents through the AI catalog, enabling teams to tailor agents to their engineering standards. GitLab also integrates External Agents, such as Claude Code from Anthropic and Codex CLI from OpenAI, providing native access with transparent security controls.
In addition, Foundational Agentic Flows automate complex tasks like converting issues into merge requests, modernizing CI/CD pipelines, fixing pipeline failures, and streamlining code reviews. Governance and visibility features ensure leaders can track agent usage, measure impact, and maintain responsible AI adoption.
The platform is available across GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, and GitLab Dedicated as part of the GitLab 18.8 release. Flexible model selection, group-based access controls, and enterprise-grade governance further support scalable adoption. GitLab also introduces GitLab Credits, allowing Premium and Ultimate customers to access Duo Agent Platform features with included monthly credits.
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Industry leaders see this as a major shift.
“GitLab Duo Agent Platform enhances our development workflow with AI that truly understands our codebase and our organization,” said Bal Kang, engineering platform lead at NatWest. “Having GitLab Duo AI agents embedded in our system of record for code, tests, CI/CD, and the entire software development lifecycle boosts productivity, velocity, and efficiency. The agents have become true collaborators to our teams, and their ability to understand intent, break down problems, and take action frees our developers to tackle the exciting, innovative work they love.”
Looking ahead, analysts expect rapid adoption.
“IDC forecasts that by 2030, 70% of organizations will embed AI agents into DevOps and DevSecOps pipelines, making orchestration platforms an increasingly important category,” said Katie Norton, research manager at IDC. “In more autonomous delivery models, the ability to coordinate agents across the software lifecycle while maintaining clear boundaries and visibility becomes a key requirement. GitLab’s approach aligns with this shift by focusing on policy enforcement and governance alongside efforts to reduce operational friction.”
From GitLab’s perspective, this release represents a turning point.
“The general availability of GitLab Duo Agent Platform marks a fundamental shift in how AI delivers value in software development,” said Manav Khurana, chief product and marketing officer at GitLab. “We’ve seen AI make coding faster, but that is just one part of what it takes to deliver innovation at scale. Now organizations can orchestrate AI agents across the entire lifecycle in one unified system, with the comprehensive context and governance they need to help them innovate and ship software faster.”
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