Cockroach Labs · 2026-10-09 · notable
MOLT Sinai — Cockroach Labs runs its coding agents like a teaching hospital
Cockroach Labs ran Claude coding agents for five months as a 'hospital' with fellows, reviewers and nurses. The pipeline landed over a million lines with 7 reverts and added Db2 support to MOLT in under two days for $4,172 in tokens.
Cockroach Labs turned GitHub issues into patients and Claude agents into a medical team, and shares five months of numbers.
What is it?
MOLT Sinai is the coding-agent pipeline Cockroach Labs built for MOLT, its toolset for migrating databases to CockroachDB. Adam Storm and Rafi Shamim describe it as a teaching hospital: issues are patients, agents play roles such as Fellow, Review Attending and Discharge Nurse, and humans act as Chiefs of Medicine who make the final calls.
How does it work?
Each stage runs on GitHub Actions and is triggered by a label on a GitHub issue. A Fellow agent reproduces the bug and writes a treatment plan, a separate Review Attending approves or rejects the plan and the code, and a Discharge Nurse checks that review, CI and the checklist are complete before merge. Planning moved to Claude Fable, which picks Sonnet or Opus for the implementation.
Why does it matter?
The post gives rare hard numbers from a long run: about 1,238 traceable PRs from April 21 to September 11, just over $135,000 in Claude tokens (about $84 per issue), and Db2 support the team puts at 164x faster and 38x cheaper than its earlier Oracle work. The authors also list the costs, such as one urgent one-line fix that took eleven rework rounds.
Who is it for?
engineering teams running coding agents in production