AI news · October 11, 2026
Cockroach Labs says coding agents shipped Db2 support in under two days
Cockroach Labs reports a hospital-style agent workflow delivered Db2 support in under two days for $4,172 in tokens, with 55 review send-backs; structured review, not raw code volume, made the case.
- reported Db2 token bill
- $4,172
- reported Db2 delivery time
- under 2 days
- review send-backs
- 55
Cockroach Labs published a case study on October 9 about MOLT Sinai, a coding-agent pipeline used to add database support. The company says Db2 support took under two days and cost $4,172 in tokens, compared with nine months and about $160,000 for Oracle support. The Db2 work involved 32 subissues, 27 pull requests, and 55 send-backs from reviewers.
The case study also says more than 1 million lines of code were produced or changed over five months, with seven reverts, and that agents authored about 85% of 1,570 commits. Those figures are company-reported, not an independent benchmark. The more useful detail is the process: agents worked from bounded issues, tests and reviewers returned changes for rework, and humans accepted the final code.
A small team should not copy the headline ratio without copying the controls. Oracle and Db2 are different tasks, and token cost is not total engineering cost. The fair comparison is accepted changes, regressions, review time, and maintenance after release against a human baseline on one repository task.
What you can do with it
Copy the process on one bounded repository task: require a plan, split dependencies, run tests, send every change through review, and log rework. Compare time to accepted merge and regression count against a human baseline.
Our take
This is one of the better agent case studies because it reports review rework instead of only code volume. It is still a vendor's account, so the numbers should guide a local trial, not a hiring or architecture decision.
Source: Cockroach Labs — Made With Models writes the brief; the reporting is theirs.