Software & DevOpsDone with custom-built or unnamed agent Oct 9, 2026
Run coding agents like a medical team to fix bugs
Over five months, the author treated bugs like patients and organized coding agents as a hospital-style team to diagnose and fix them.
- What They Did
- Cockroach Labs built a GitHub Actions pipeline in which labels on an issue trigger role-specific agents. A Fellow reproduces the bug and posts a treatment plan, and a separate Review Attending approves or rejects it before any code is written. Large issues are split into sub-issues of under 1,000 lines each. A Discharge Nurse audits the review before merge, and humans handle escalations.
- How It Went
- Over five months it merged 1,238 PRs and over a million lines of code with 7 reverts. A Db2 migration feature shipped in under two days. Reviewers sometimes looped on trivial fixes, and agents filed about half of all issues.
- Worth Knowing
- It used about $135,000 in Claude tokens, around $84 per issue. Some issues went 9 to 11 rework rounds before a circuit-breaker was added.
Try it yourself with custom-built or unnamed agent
Treat the bugs in this repo like patients in a hospital. For each bug in [issue list or file], have one agent triage and reproduce it, another diagnose the root cause, and another write a fix with a test, then have a separate reviewer check the fix. Finish with a summary table of each bug, its diagnosis, the fix and test status, and pause for my approval before committing or pushing anything.