Specialized agents for engineering assurance
General-purpose coding agents are optimized to make changes.
Assurance agents have a narrower job: evaluate those changes against a specific engineering concern and provide evidence about whether the change meets the required standard.
Each assurance agent focuses on an explicit domain such as Kubernetes, security, API compatibility, or dependency upgrades.
One concern. Multiple intervention points.
Coding skill
Evaluate the current change before commit.
PR review
Independently review the pull request before merge.
CI gate
Evaluate the broader codebase and approve or fail the required check.
Runtime audit
Where applicable, inspect the deployed system and detect drift.
Rules owned by the engineering organization
An assurance agent should not rely only on generic industry advice. It should combine:
- broadly useful engineering checks
- organization-specific rules
- repository context
- architecture and platform conventions
- explicit exceptions
- evidence from the code or runtime environment
The engineering organization remains the owner of its standards and acceptance criteria.
Co-created with customers
We develop assurance agents with engineering teams around real problems. A typical starting point is:
- Choose one engineering concern
- Collect the existing standards and examples
- Identify rules that are worth automating
- Implement and test the checks
- Run against real changes and repositories
- Review false positives, misses, and exceptions
- Refine the agent
- Integrate it into the development workflow
This co-creation approach keeps the product grounded in real engineering practice.
Initial assurance areas
Kubernetes Assurance
Apply Kubernetes and platform rules across code, pull requests, CI, and deployed clusters.
Learn more about Kubernetes AssuranceSecurity Assurance
Check software changes against organization-specific secure-development rules.
Learn more about Security AssuranceAPI & Contract Assurance
Protect service contracts, compatibility, schemas, and consumers across repositories.
Learn more about API & Contract AssuranceDependency & Upgrade Assurance
Review dependency changes, compatibility, support status, migration impact, and approved technology choices.
Learn more about Dependency & Upgrade Assurance
More assurance domains can use the same model
Other areas that could follow the same model include:
- reliability and resilience
- observability
- testing sufficiency
- performance
- cost controls
- data architecture
- compliance
- infrastructure
New assurance agents should be created when an engineering concern has clear ownership, explicit rules, repeatable evidence, and meaningful pass/fail or review criteria.
Frequently asked questions
An assurance agent evaluates changes against one specific engineering concern, such as Kubernetes, security, API compatibility, or dependency upgrades, and provides evidence about whether the change meets the required standard.
A coding agent is optimized to make changes. An assurance agent has a narrower job: independently checking those changes against an explicit set of rules.
The engineering organization owns its standards and acceptance criteria. Assurance agents combine broadly useful checks with organization-specific rules, repository context, and explicit exceptions.
No. Runtime audit is available only where the assurance domain has meaningful runtime state, such as Kubernetes, infrastructure, security configuration, or observability.