🤘 Vibe Coding ?
Vibecoding is clearly THE buzzword of recent months, bringing the famous debate that “Developers will disappear with IA and vibecoding”.
Anyway, vibecoding represents a new practice for producing applications from prompts, without writing a single line of code, and this is the new revolution.
Many tools already exist, and this blog post will once again talk about GitLab Duo.
I’m revisiting it because I’m a long-time user and a big fan of GitLab Duo since I discovered and tested it since 2 years, cf this blog post and my Cheatsheet (which I definitively need to update with this beta feature 😅) https://dev.to/zenika/gitlab-cheatsheet-15-gitlab-duo-3fhg
🦊 GitLab Duo Agent Platform
GitLab brought a new version of GitLab Duo : GitLab Duo Agent Platform. This new version focuses, as the name mentions it, on the agentic world.
This project contains some features :
- An agentic version of GitLab Duo Chat which understands a bigger context than GitLab Duo and it is able to create and edit files on your projects. This chat can retrieve information from different sources.
- A CLI agent allows to call a user @GitLab Duo in issues, merge requests or epics to help you
- An AI catalog that lists all public agents available
GitLab Duo Agent Platform is based on “Flows”, a combination of agents available on GitLab UI and IDE plugin and able to help you for example for fixing your CI/CD pipelines and convert issues to merge requests.
So many things are evolving : https://docs.gitlab.com/user/duo_agent_platform/agent_assistant/#anthropic-claude
🃏Time for the demo
AI Catalog
The AI Catalog, available here : https://gitlab.com/explore/ai-catalog/agents, contains public agents you can use on your projects.
Private agents can also appear in this page like this one I created to test this platform.
After providing a name, a description and setting the access rights, a prompt must be configured to explain the agent’s task. Tools can also be added to provide the agent with more context.
To test this agent, in VS Code, I asked to initialize a README.md and we can see in the log that the gitmoji 📝 is well used.
Agents
The most powerful feature is the merge request generation. On an issue, a new “Generate MR with Duo” button will create a new “Agent session”. Within a few minutes, a new merge request will appear, complete with a description of the different steps and a single commit.
A new “Automate” menu allows you to see the GitLab Duo Agent’s work in progress. Each step of their reflection is displayed.
The result was this merge request. GitLab Duo explains, and this is a very important aspect for me, what it did to address your issue. It made one commit with over 20 files.
Of course, the generated code needs to be reviewed. In this example, the npm run serve command failed due to a missing parameter export.
Agent CLI
This first experiment involved an issue where I asked GitLab Duo to replace the Node.js backend with a Quarkus application.
I particularly appreciate how GitLab Duo explains its thought process and each step, until going to the commit command. This can be very helpful for both junior and expert developers.
🙌 Feedback
This agent integration is very impressive.The ability to initiate a merge request and add changes directly from an issue using GitLab Duo Agent Platform is a big real time performer. While it is, of course, crucial for developers to review the code generated by IA, it provides an excellent foundation of work.
I’m eager to see the new GitLab release to further explore and test how Duo can enhance our productivity.
And a big thanks to John for providing me the opportunity to test this fantastic feature 🙏
Best practices are defined by GitLab in this page
Top comments (2)
Agent platform is clearly a big change!
And with the MCP, you can connect the agents directly to the GitLab instance to broaden the capabilities!
The one I really love and use daily to make DAP even more efficient is GitLab Knowledge Graph. Provides a way better understanding of your code-base to the agents!
GKG is great! I tested it (and share this experience here dev.to/zenika/exploring-the-gitlab...) 😁