Background Coding Agent
a project by mmanno
Updated 20 days ago. 1 hackers ♥️. 1 follower.

Description

I had only bad experiences with AI one-shots. However, monitoring agent work closely and interfering often did result in productivity gains.

Now, other companies are using agents in pipelines. That makes sense to me, just like CI, we want to offload work to pipelines: Our engineering teams are consistently slowed down by "toil": low-impact, repetitive maintenance tasks. A simple linter rule change, a dependency bump, rebasing patch-sets on top of newer releases or API deprecation requires dozens of manual PRs, draining time from feature development.

So far we have been writing deterministic, script-based automation for these tasks. And it turns out to be a common trap. These scripts are brittle, complex, and become a massive maintenance burden themselves.

Can we make prompts and workflows smart enough to succeed at background coding?

Goals

We will build a platform that allows engineers to execute complex code transformations using prompts.

By automating this toil, we accelerate large-scale migrations and allow teams to focus on high-value work.

Our platform will consist of three main components:

  • "Change" Definition: Engineers will define a transformation as a simple, declarative manifest:
    • The target repositories.
    • A wrapper to run a "coding agent", e.g., "gemini-cli".
    • The task as a natural language prompt.
  • "Change" Management Service: A central service that orchestrates the jobs. It will receive Change definitions and be responsible for the job lifecycle.
  • Execution Runners: We could use existing sandboxed CI runners (like GitHub/GitLab runners) to execute each job or spawn a container.

MVP

  • Define the Change manifest format.
  • Build the core Management Service that can accept and queue a Change.
  • Connect management service and runners, dynamically dispatch jobs to runners.
  • Create a basic runner script that can run a hard-coded prompt against a test repo and open a PR.

Stretch Goals:

  • Multi-layered approach, Workflow Agents trigger Coding Agents:
    1. Workflow Agent: Gather information about the task interactively from the user.
    2. Coding Agent: Once the interactive agent has refined the task into a clear prompt, it hands this prompt off to the "coding agent." This background agent is responsible for executing the task and producing the actual pull request.
  • Use MCP:
    1. Workflow Agent gathers context information from Slack, Github, etc.
    2. Workflow Agent triggers a Coding Agent.
  • Create a "Standard Task" library with reliable prompts.
    1. Rebasing rancher-monitoring to a new version of kube-prom-stack
    2. Update charts to use new images
    3. Apply changes to comply with a new linter
    4. Bump complex Go dependencies, like k8s modules
    5. Backport pull requests to other branches
  • Add “review agents” that review the generated PR.

See also

Resources

  • Hosting for runners
  • License for agents

Join this project

Looking for hackers with the skills:

agents workflow ai

This project is part of:

Hack Week 25

Activity

  • 19 days ago: pgonin liked this project.
  • 20 days ago: mmanno added keyword "agents" to this project.
  • 20 days ago: mmanno added keyword "workflow" to this project.
  • 20 days ago: mmanno added keyword "ai" to this project.
  • 20 days ago: mmanno started this project.
  • 21 days ago: mmanno originated this project.


    • Comments

    • mmanno
      10 days ago by mmanno | Reply

      Created Background Automated Coding Agent, a declarative, prompt-driven code transformation platform:

      And researched API aggregation a bit:

    Similar Projects

    SUSE Observability MCP server by drutigliano

    Description

    The idea is to implement the SUSE Observability Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server as a specialized, middle-tier API designed to translate the complex, high-cardinality observability data from StackState (topology, metrics, and events) into highly structured, contextually rich, and LLM-ready snippets.

    This MCP Server abstract the StackState APIs. Its primary function is to serve as a Tool/Function Calling target for AI agents. When an AI receives an alert or a user query (e.g., "What caused the outage?"), the AI calls an MCP Server endpoint. The server then fetches the relevant operational facts, summarizes them, normalizes technical identifiers (like URNs and raw metric names) into natural language concepts, and returns a concise JSON or YAML payload. This payload is then injected directly into the LLM's prompt, ensuring the final diagnosis or action is grounded in real-time, accurate SUSE Observability data, effectively minimizing hallucinations.

    Goals

    • Grounding AI Responses: Ensure that all AI diagnoses, root cause analyses, and action recommendations are strictly based on verifiable, real-time data retrieved from the SUSE Observability StackState platform.
    • Simplifying Data Access: Abstract the complexity of StackState's native APIs (e.g., Time Travel, 4T Data Model) into simple, semantic functions that can be easily invoked by LLM tool-calling mechanisms.
    • Data Normalization: Convert complex, technical identifiers (like component URNs, raw metric names, and proprietary health states) into standardized, natural language terms that an LLM can easily reason over.
    • Enabling Automated Remediation: Define clear, action-oriented MCP endpoints (e.g., execute_runbook) that allow the AI agent to initiate automated operational workflows (e.g., restarts, scaling) after a diagnosis, closing the loop on observability.

     Hackweek STEP

    • Create a functional MCP endpoint exposing one (or more) tool(s) to answer queries like "What is the health of service X?") by fetching, normalizing, and returning live StackState data in an LLM-ready format.

     Scope

    • Implement read-only MCP server that can:
      • Connect to a live SUSE Observability instance and authenticate (with API token)
      • Use tools to fetch data for a specific component URN (e.g., current health state, metrics, possibly topology neighbors, ...).
      • Normalize response fields (e.g., URN to "Service Name," health state DEVIATING to "Unhealthy", raw metrics).
      • Return the data as a structured JSON payload compliant with the MCP specification.

    Deliverables

    • MCP Server v0.1 A running Golang MCP server with at least one tool.
    • A README.md and a test script (e.g., curl commands or a simple notebook) showing how an AI agent would call the endpoint and the resulting JSON payload.

    Outcome A functional and testable API endpoint that proves the core concept: translating complex StackState data into a simple, LLM-ready format. This provides the foundation for developing AI-driven diagnostics and automated remediation.

    Resources

    • https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/its-the-end-of-observability-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine
    • https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-remote-mcp-server
    • https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/index
    • https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/develop/build-server

     Basic implementation

    • https://github.com/drutigliano19/suse-observability-mcp-server

    Results

    Successfully developed and delivered a fully functional SUSE Observability MCP Server that bridges language models with SUSE Observability's operational data. This project demonstrates how AI agents can perform intelligent troubleshooting and root cause analysis using structured access to real-time infrastructure data.

    Example execution

    Update M2Crypto by mcepl

    There are couple of projects I work on, which need my attention and putting them to shape:

    Goal for this Hackweek

    • Put M2Crypto into better shape (most issues closed, all pull requests processed)
    • More fun to learn jujutsu
    • Play more with Gemini, how much it help (or not).
    • Perhaps, also (just slightly related), help to fix vis to work with LuaJIT, particularly to make vis-lspc working.

    Liz - Prompt autocomplete by ftorchia

    Description

    Liz is the Rancher AI assistant for cluster operations.

    Goals

    We want to help users when sending new messages to Liz, by adding an autocomplete feature to complete their requests based on the context.

    Example:

    • User prompt: "Can you show me the list of p"
    • Autocomplete suggestion: "Can you show me the list of p...od in local cluster?"

    Example:

    • User prompt: "Show me the logs of #rancher-"
    • Chat console: It shows a drop-down widget, next to the # character, with the list of available pod names starting with "rancher-".

    Technical Overview

    1. The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
    2. The UI extension should be able to display prompt suggestions and allow users to apply the autocomplete to the Prompt via keyboard shortcuts.

    Resources

    GitHub repository

    The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio

    Rancher is a beast of a codebase. Let's investigate if the new 2025 generation of GitHub Autonomous Coding Agents and Copilot Workspaces can actually tame it. A GitHub robot mascot trying to lasso a blue bull with a Kubernetes logo tatooed on it

    The Plan

    Create a sandbox GitHub Organization, clone in key Rancher repositories, and let the AI loose to see if it can handle real-world enterprise OSS maintenance - or if it just hallucinates new breeds of Kubernetes resources!

    Specifically, throw "Agentic Coders" some typical tasks in a complex, long-lived open-source project, such as:


    ❥ The Grunt Work: generate missing GoDocs, unit tests, and refactorings. Rebase PRs.

    ❥ The Complex Stuff: fix actual (historical) bugs and feature requests to see if they can traverse the complexity without (too much) human hand-holding.

    ❥ Hunting Down Gaps: find areas lacking in docs, areas of improvement in code, dependency bumps, and so on.


    If time allows, also experiment with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give agents context on our specific build pipelines and CI/CD logs.

    Why?

    We know AI can write "Hello World." and also moderately complex programs from a green field. But can it rebase a 3-month-old PR with conflicts in rancher/rancher? I want to find the breaking point of current AI agents to determine if and how they can help us to reduce our technical debt, work faster and better. At the same time, find out about pitfalls and shortcomings.

    The CONCLUSION!!!

    A add-emoji State of the Union add-emoji document was compiled to summarize lessons learned this week. For more gory details, just read on the diary below! add-emoji

    Bugzilla goes AI - Phase 1 by nwalter

    Description

    This project, Bugzilla goes AI, aims to boost developer productivity by creating an autonomous AI bug agent during Hackweek. The primary goal is to reduce the time employees spend triaging bugs by integrating Ollama to summarize issues, recommend next steps, and push focused daily reports to a Web Interface.

    Goals

    To reduce employee time spent on Bugzilla by implementing an AI tool that triages and summarizes bug reports, providing actionable recommendations to the team via Web Interface.

    Project Charter

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HbAvgrg8T3pd1FIx74nEfCObCljpO77zz5In_Jpw4as/edit?usp=sharing## Description

    Project Achievements during Hackweek

    In this file you can read about what we achieved during Hackweek.

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/14gtG9-ZvVpBgkh33Z4AM6iLFWqZcicQPD41MM-Pg0/edit?usp=sharing

    Enable more features in mcp-server-uyuni by j_renner

    Description

    I would like to contribute to mcp-server-uyuni, the MCP server for Uyuni / Multi-Linux Manager) exposing additional features as tools. There is lots of relevant features to be found throughout the API, for example:

    • System operations and infos
    • System groups
    • Maintenance windows
    • Ansible
    • Reporting
    • ...

    At the end of the week I managed to enable basic system group operations:

    • List all system groups visible to the user
    • Create new system groups
    • List systems assigned to a group
    • Add and remove systems from groups

    Goals

    • Set up test environment locally with the MCP server and client + a recent MLM server [DONE]
    • Identify features and use cases offering a benefit with limited effort required for enablement [DONE]
    • Create a PR to the repo [DONE]

    Resources