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.
How the agent loop works in practice
Section titled “How the agent loop works in practice”- 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.
- Context retrieval – Cosine navigates the codebase, reads relevant files, and gathers the information needed to start.
- Planning – It breaks the task into subtasks and forms a step-by-step plan, just like an engineer would.
- 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.
- Testing & validation – Before surfacing results, Cosine runs tests (existing or generated), validates outcomes, and iterates until confident the task is solved.
- 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.
Key design principles
Section titled “Key design principles”- 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.
Real-world example
Section titled “Real-world example”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.
Related pages
Section titled “Related pages”→ Next: What are Cosine’s core features?