Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team

Cockroach Labs deployed a coding agent pipeline structured like a teaching hospital, with distinct roles enforcing rigorous reviews and safety checks, to add IBM Db2 support to their MOLT database migration tool in under two days for $4,172—164 times faster and 38 times cheaper than the nine-month, $160K effort required for Oracle support. Over five months, this agent-based system successfully processed over a million lines of code with only 7 reverts, demonstrating that structured agentic workflows can safely handle complex software development while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability.