gitlabJul 20, 2026

GitLab Transcend Hackathon: What developers built on GitLab Orbit (opens in new tab)

GitLab’s Transcend Hackathon showed how developers use GitLab Orbit’s live code graph to answer questions about dependencies, ownership, testing, deployments, and risk. Of 1,576 registered participants, teams submitted 265 eligible projects, while contributors also merged 61 improvements into Orbit itself. The strongest projects used graph-based context to improve change analysis, migrations, testing, security response, and agent governance. ## Problems Developers Targeted - Around 70 teams built tools to predict what a change might break before merging. - More than 30 focused on onboarding and codebase comprehension. - Other common use cases included: - Incident root-cause analysis - Architecture drift detection - Flaky-pipeline diagnosis - CVE tracing across repositories - The popularity of these projects reflected a shared problem: relevant information is scattered across Git, CI, deployment systems, and dashboards. - Orbit consolidates those relationships into a queryable graph that agents can access through MCP or engineers can query directly. ## Technological Implementation - **Winner: Sankofa** - Provides three agents triggered by different workflow events: - **Radar** analyzes merge-request blast radius, affected pipelines, and ownership. - **Guide** prepares briefs when issues are assigned. - **Shield** traces vulnerabilities through the dependency graph. - Shield can identify a vulnerability’s full reach in one graph traversal. - **Runner-up: Stayed Shipped** - Measures whether changes merged by AI agents remain in production. - Detects changes that were later silently fixed forward, a result standard dashboards often miss. ## Design and Usability - **Winner: Carver** - Estimates the cost and risk of legacy migrations using Orbit’s dependency graph. - Breaks work into units, estimates effort and generation cost, and highlights untested, high-risk services. - Refuses to invent estimates when the relevant service cannot be grounded in Orbit. - **Runner-up: Marshal** - Takes an organization-wide migration goal, identifies affected repositories, sequences the work, and creates merge requests in waves. ## Potential Impact - **Winner: CrossCut** - Selects only tests that a change can actually affect. - Traverses Orbit’s call graph from changed symbols to determine transitive test impact. - Can reduce CI workloads by 90% or more on large or cross-repository suites. - **Runner-up: OrbitWeaver** - Performs autonomous refactoring using exact graph-based blast radius rather than vector similarity. - Updates affected files in dependency order, reducing the risk of incomplete refactors and broken pipelines. ## Quality of the Idea - **Winner: Transcend** - Extends Orbit with OWL, SPARQL, RDF, and semantic-web reasoning. - Supports queries involving transitive closure, external knowledge bases, and complex joins beyond the native API. - Its demonstration connected code implementing knowledge-graph embedding methods with related papers, authors, and publication years. - **Runner-up: Universal Agent OS** - Focuses on agent governance rather than agent capabilities. - Requires agents to interview users, plan before coding, preserve evidence, and validate their work. - Emphasizes accountability as AI-generated code becomes more common. ## Contributions to Orbit - The Contribute Track produced 61 merged merge requests from 26 contributors. - Improvements included: - Support for C++20 concepts, Go package declarations, Kotlin coroutines, and Ruby lambdas - Ontology corrections - A CI SIGPIPE fix - The first Orbit query tutorial - Documentation fixes, including clarification of `max_depth` versus `max_hops` - Nineteen contributors received cash prizes, and all participants earned swag credits. GitLab Orbit’s strongest value is not simply agent orchestration but the structured context behind it. Teams building reliable developer automation should prioritize a live dependency and ownership graph, using precise traversal where correctness matters more than probabilistic retrieval.

gitlab-orbitai-agentmodel-context-protocolsparql+4

gitlabJul 20, 2026

Automate work item assignment with GitLab Duo (opens in new tab)

The GitLab Duo Agent Platform’s new **“Work item created”** trigger automates triage as soon as an issue or other work item is created. A custom flow can assess team workloads and assign the item without manual intervention, improving speed and workload balance. The post demonstrates this using two agents and GitLab Orbit. ## The Problem with Manual Assignment - Team members must repeatedly check capacity, workload, meetings, and PTO before routing each work item. - Manual triage becomes slow and inconsistent as issue volume grows. - Previously, GitLab Duo Flows required a human action—such as a mention or assignment—to start. ## How the Trigger Works - The trigger fires immediately when a work item is created in a configured project. - Flows run continuously in the background without requiring someone to initiate them. - This enables instant, scalable routing while developers focus on higher-value decisions. ## Benefits of Automated Triage - Assigns and routes work immediately. - Handles anything from a single issue to hundreds of items. - Applies workload and availability criteria consistently. - Removes repetitive assignment work from team leads and developers. ## Example: The “Work Item Assigner” Flow - The demonstrated flow runs in the `Intra-account-transfers` project. - Its first agent uses GitLab Orbit to determine each resource’s number of open work items across the top-level group. - A second agent identifies the least-loaded person and assigns the new work item to them. - When a new issue is created, the flow activity log shows both agents executing their steps. - In the example, the issue is automatically assigned to William, who has the lightest workload. ## Potential Enhancements - Connect the flow to HR or PTO systems through Model Context Protocol (MCP) to account for upcoming leave. - Integrate team calendars to consider real-time availability when making assignments. The post recommends using the “Work item created” trigger with workload-aware agents to automate routine assignment decisions, achieve faster triage, and distribute work more evenly.

gitlab-orbitai-agentmodel-context-protocolworkflow-automation+3

gitlabJun 30, 2026

Claude Sonnet 5 on GitLab: More reliable, more efficient (opens in new tab)

Claude Sonnet 5 is now available on GitLab Duo Agent Platform through GitLab’s AI Gateway across all tiers and deployment models. GitLab reports that it is the first model to complete every task in its evaluation suite, compared with 93.8% for Sonnet 4.6, while resolving 8.8% more issues. The result is intended to make software-engineering agents more reliable, efficient, and suitable for production-scale workflows. ## More Reliable Agent Runs - Sonnet 5 is designed for multi-step development tasks, code generation, and automated workflows. - Completing every benchmark task reduces failures that require diagnosis, reprompting, and verification. - GitLab highlights applications including: - Multi-file refactoring - Test generation - Security investigations across repository history - Pipeline-failure analysis - Higher completion rates allow developers to review agent output instead of repeatedly restarting incomplete runs. ## Lower Cost Through Efficiency - Reliability and resource efficiency reduce the effective cost of completed agent tasks. - Models on GitLab Duo consume GitLab Credits at different rates. - Teams can control spending by using a model whose cost and performance fit routine development work. - GitLab directs users to its Credits documentation for model-specific consumption rates. ## Selecting the Right Model - Sonnet 5 is positioned as a dependable default for everyday software-development tasks. - Sonnet-class models aim to balance quality, speed, and cost. - Claude Opus 4.8 remains available for complex, long-running tasks requiring greater reasoning depth. - Teams can select models per task through model selection in their GitLab instance. ## Availability - Claude Sonnet 5 is available immediately on GitLab Duo Agent Platform through the AI Gateway. - It runs on GitLab Credits and is offered across all tiers and deployment models. - New users can start through a Duo Agent Platform trial or GitLab Free, while Premium and Ultimate subscribers can use included credits. Overall, GitLab presents Claude Sonnet 5 as a more reliable and economical choice for routine agent-assisted development, with more powerful models available when tasks require deeper reasoning.

gitlab-orbitai-agentdevsecopsgitlab-duo-agent-platform+2

gitlabJun 25, 2026

Google Antigravity agents get full context with GitLab Orbit (opens in new tab)

Google Antigravity agents can now access GitLab’s broader software lifecycle context through GitLab Orbit, available in the Antigravity MCP Store. Orbit builds a knowledge graph connecting code, projects, dependencies, merge requests, pipelines, users, and vulnerabilities, allowing agents to answer questions that would otherwise require manual research across GitLab. GitLab reports that internally tested agents using Orbit were up to 11 times faster, used 4.5 times fewer tokens, and hallucinated up to 45 times less. ## GitLab Orbit Adds Lifecycle Context - Antigravity agents can normally access files and terminals but lack information about: - Service dependencies - Related vulnerabilities - Merge request history - Code ownership and reviewers - Pipeline performance - Orbit indexes GitLab and exposes its knowledge graph through: - `query_graph` for structured lifecycle queries - `get_graph_schema` for available node types, properties, and relationships - Agents receive typed results through GitLab Orbit’s JSON query DSL. ## Practical Development Use Cases ### Blast radius analysis - Engineers can identify which projects depend on a module before refactoring it. - Agents can also find open merge requests affecting those files and identify their owners. - This reveals conflicts and stakeholders before changes are made. ### Onboarding and codebase exploration - Agents can explain a service’s dependencies, entry points, and recently opened merge requests. - Results can be captured in a persistent Walkthrough Artifact rather than disappearing in chat. - Orbit reindexes changes within minutes, keeping documentation more current than static wikis. ### Live architecture diagrams - Agents can query service dependencies and render them as diagrams using Nano Banana Pro. - Diagrams can be filtered, such as showing only services with unresolved security findings. - Access controls apply to every query, making generated diagrams safe to share. - GitLab is developing similar functionality through its Software Architecture Map. ## Installation Through the MCP Store - Open Antigravity settings and go to the customization tab. - Find the MCP section and select **Add MCP**. - Choose GitLab Orbit and authenticate with GitLab. - No configuration files or terminal commands are required. ## Availability and Technical Details - Orbit uses the same context engine as GitLab Duo Agent Platform. - It supports code indexing for Ruby, Java, Kotlin, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Rust, and C#. - Code is indexed from the default branch and refreshed within minutes. - MCP queries consume GitLab Credits, while `get_graph_schema` calls are free. - The feature is available to GitLab Premium and Ultimate customers on GitLab.com. For teams already using GitLab and Google Antigravity, GitLab Orbit provides a governed, current context layer that can make agents more accurate and useful. Teams should enable Orbit for a top-level group and install it through the Antigravity MCP Store, while accounting for GitLab tier requirements and credit usage.

gitlab-orbitmodel-context-protocoldevsecopsgitlab-duo-agent-platform+3

gitlabJun 10, 2026

Introducing GitLab Orbit (opens in new tab)

GitLab Orbit is a public-beta, queryable graph that connects code with merge requests, pipelines, deployments, vulnerabilities, incidents, and ownership. GitLab argues that this unified context makes AI agents faster, more accurate, and capable of answering cross-system questions that traditional file search or RAG cannot. In testing, Orbit improved code-review accuracy while reducing agent runtime, token use, and hallucinations. ## The Problem with Code-Only Agents - Agents often struggle to understand the systems surrounding code: - Related files and dependencies - Tests and pipelines - Deployments and environments - Vulnerabilities and ownership - Work items and merge requests - In large or multi-repository codebases, agents can waste tokens exploring irrelevant paths, miss dependencies, or run out of context. - This can produce code that appears correct but is later reverted or requires substantial human correction. ## Results from Compare the Market - Compare the Market tested four context-retrieval approaches across 79 real merge requests. - An Orbit-grounded AI reviewer: - Placed accurate inline comments about 70% of the time. - Outperformed RAG, which achieved roughly 58%. - Produced slightly better summaries of key changes: 68% versus 66%. - RAG performed worse than the other tested approaches, including using no additional context. ## Faster and More Efficient Coding Agents - Claude Code and other agents can connect to Orbit through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). - Instead of crawling a repository to infer relationships, an agent can query the graph directly for: - Where code is located - What depends on it - Which tests and pipelines cover it - GitLab reports up to: - 11× faster execution - 4.5× lower token usage - 45× fewer hallucinations ## Cross-System Engineering Workflows Orbit enables agents on the GitLab Duo Agent Platform to investigate relationships beyond source code. - **Pipeline failure triage** - Agents can identify merge requests associated with a failing job. - They can find other projects and in-flight changes likely to encounter the same failure. - This can help teams resolve shared incidents centrally rather than repeating investigations. - **Vulnerability blast-radius analysis** - Queries can trace vulnerable components through services, pipelines, environments, and owning teams. - Security teams can produce assigned remediation plans shortly after a CVE is discovered. - **Engineering metrics** - Teams can query relationships between cycle time, pipeline failure rates, and deployment frequency without waiting for custom dashboards or SQL analysis. - **Migration planning** - Orbit identifies dependent services, jobs, environments, and owners. - This reduces the risk of discovering hidden dependencies late in a migration. ## Architecture and Access - Orbit ingests lifecycle data through change-data capture into ClickHouse. - It parses code in 12 languages, including Ruby, Java, Python, TypeScript, Rust, Go, C#, C++, and PHP. - GitLab reports indexing more than: - 40,000 projects - 500 million nodes - 2 billion edges - The graph can be queried through: - A Cypher-like query language - MCP - REST - The GitLab CLI - An event-driven engine keeps the graph current as changes occur. - Indexing runs separately from GitLab, so query traffic does not burden the GitLab instance. - Authorization follows existing GitLab permissions, limiting agents to data their users can access. - Queries pass through validation, planning, optimization, and security stages before reaching the database. ## Engineer-Facing Data Explorer - The Data Explorer provides direct access to the same graph without an AI agent. - Engineers can use it to: - Investigate incidents - Trace dependencies across services - Diagnose recurring CI failures - GitLab positions it as a way to answer open-ended system questions in seconds rather than reconstructing the answer manually across multiple tools. GitLab Orbit is best suited to organizations where code, CI/CD, security, and ownership data are spread across large repositories or many projects. Its main recommendation is to use one permission-aware graph as shared context for both AI agents and engineers, rather than relying on repository search or disconnected tool calls.

gitlab-orbitai-agentmodel-context-protocolcontinuous-integration+3