German food ordering and delivery company Delivery Hero has launched Herogen, an autonomous AI-driven software agent.
According to the company, the AI agent can deliver an annual coding capacity comparable to 130 engineers.
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The tool has been built internally with large language models (LLMs) and was made available to product and engineering teams in February.
Delivery Hero said that Herogen can operate autonomously, setting it apart from earlier AI coding assistants that required “constant manual oversight”.
Engineers can assign the tool tasks in natural language, after which it generates code, runs tests and iterates on its own before submitting the result as a proposed change.
The output is then examined by a “council of agents” running on multiple LLMs from different providers.
This automated review checks the code from a range of angles, after which a human engineer performs a final review step.
Herogen currently posts an 85% success rate, based on the proportion of its pull requests that are merged versus those that are rejected.
The company said the system autonomously merges more than 100 code changes a day, which it estimates saves approximately 250,000 hours of manual coding work each year.
Delivery Hero chief technology officer Benjamin Mann said: “As we build the ‘Everyday App’ for our customers, Herogen allows us to deliver much bigger output with the same elite team.
“It changes how our engineers spend their days, but it does not move them away from their craft.
“As the tool takes on mundane tasks and repetitive toil, our people regain the time to solve the hardest problems, to build strong systems on a global scale and find new ways to keep us in the lead.”
Although Herogen is currently used by 18% of Delivery Hero’s developers, the agent already accounts for 9% of all code change requests across the organisation.
The company plans to broaden the usage and is targeting a point where Herogen is responsible for 20% of all code change requests by the end of the year.
Last month, Delivery Hero agreed to divest its Foodpanda operations in Taiwan for $600m as part of a strategic review.
