A Knowledge Graph of code by GitLab
If you could hire the smartest engineers and drop them in your code base would you expect miracles overnight? No, of course not! Because even if they are the best of coders, they don’t have context on your project, engineering processes and culture, security and compliance rules, user personas, business priorities, etc. The same is true of the very best agents.. they may know how to write (mostly) technically correct code, and have the context of your source code, but they’re still missing tons of context.
Building agents that can deliver high quality outcomes, faster, is going to require much more than your source code, rules and a few prompts. Agents need the same full lifecyle context your engineers gain after being months and years on the job. LLMs will never have access to your company’s engineering systems to train on, so something has to bridge the knowledge gap and it shouldn’t be you, one prompt at a time. This is why we're building what we call our Knowledge Graph at GitLab.
It's not just indexing files and code; it's mapping the relationships across your entire development environment. When an agent understands that a particular code block contains three security vulnerabilities, impacts two downstream services, and connects to a broader epic about performance improvements, it can make smarter recommendations and changes than just technically correct code.
This kind of contextual reasoning is what separates valuable AI agents from expensive, slow, LLM driven search tools. We're moving toward a world where institutional knowledge becomes portable and queryable. The context of a veteran engineer who knows "why we built it this way" or "what happened last time we tried this approach" can now be captured, connected, and made available to both human teammates and AI agents. See the awesome demos below and I look forward to sharing more later this month in our 18.4 beta update!