Five Months Treating Bugs Like Patients and Coding Agents Like a Medical Team
Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs’ MOLT Sinai “coding hospital” pipeline added Db2 support to its MOLT migration tooling without human-written code during execution. The Db2 migration support work finished in less than two days and the Claude token bill was $4,172 (164x faster and 38x cheaper than the prior Oracle effort). After this pilot, the team enabled human approval mode for merges and used the same system to build the Migration Assistant, which is in preview for Postgres migrations and largely authored by the pipeline.
Why it matters
Cockroach Labs frames coding-agent work like a teaching hospital, with reviewed plans, distinct implementation/review roles, structured handoffs, and an audit before merge. The pipeline reportedly landed over a million lines of code in five months, and human approval became mandatory after an initial autonomous week.