Code Scans

summary

Cognition is introducing Code Scans, a tool powered by Agentic MapReduce that transforms high-level engineering goals into actionable pull requests. By automating the investigation of large codebases, the tool identifies specific areas for improvement, evaluates findings, and implements changes. This approach removes the initial burden of manual codebase exploration, allowing teams to tackle long-standing backlog items like performance optimization and SEO. The system ensures comprehensive coverage by sharding the codebase and utilizing parallel agents to synthesize results.

key points

1. The Agentic MapReduce architecture follows a four-phase process of planning, sharding, mapping, and reducing to efficiently process vast amounts of code. This pipeline allows the system to distribute focused batches of code to parallel agents, ensuring that no part of the codebase is missed while keeping the reasoning budget focused.
2. Code Scans can be applied to diverse engineering goals, ranging from reducing Rust compilation times by streamlining dependencies to improving SEO health scores by fixing metadata and redirect chains. Real-world tests showed a high PR merge rate and significant savings in engineering hours by automating the discovery of redundant code and inefficient patterns.
3. Users can define their own custom criteria or use predefined categories like database query efficiency, accessibility compliance, and migration planning. This flexibility allows teams to integrate their own coding standards and checklists into the automated scanning process to maintain high software quality.

who should read it

Engineering managers and software developers who want to automate technical debt reduction and codebase optimization. It is especially useful for those managing large repositories where manual auditing is too time-consuming.

discussion skeptical