Skip to content

How does Cosine work?

Cosine works like an autonomous engineer inside your team. You give it a task — via Jira, GitHub, Slack, or another integration — and it retrieves context, plans a solution, writes and tests code, and then submits a pull request for human review.


  1. Task intake – A ticket is tagged for Cosine in Jira, GitHub, Linear, or Slack. Cosine interprets the request as if it were assigned to a teammate.
  2. Context retrieval – Cosine navigates the codebase, reads relevant files, and gathers the information needed to start.
  3. Planning – It breaks the task into subtasks and forms a step-by-step plan, just like an engineer would.
  4. Execution – Cosine edits code, adds new functions, or refactors modules. Depending on your setup, it can integrate with a sandbox or CI environment to validate its changes before creating a PR.
  5. Testing & validation – Before surfacing results, Cosine runs tests (existing or generated), validates outcomes, and iterates until confident the task is solved.
  6. Pull request submission – The output is a Git-style PR, ready for review. Engineers can comment, request changes, or merge just like with a human colleague.

This loop repeats for every assigned task, whether it’s a bugfix, migration, test addition, or documentation update.


  • Asynchronous, not in your IDE: Unlike copilots (e.g. Copilot, Cursor), Cosine isn’t typing next to you — it’s working in the background so you can focus elsewhere.
  • Multi-agent orchestration: Cosine can coordinate multiple Genie agents in parallel, each tackling different aspects of a task.
  • Enterprise flexibility: Runs in the cloud, inside a VPC, or fully on-premise (including air-gapped deployments).
  • Transparency: Users can view Cosine’s intermediate reasoning and nudge it mid-execution if it veers off course.

A customer once assigned Cosine their entire backlog in one go. Cosine worked through the list asynchronously and resolved 30–40% of issues — tasks that otherwise would have remained untouched.

Cosine’s own team has also merged 1,900 PRs since June using the agent loop, proving its reliability at scale.


→ Next: What are Cosine’s core features?