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

  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.

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

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

→ Next: Is Cosine an autonomous software engineer or a copilot?

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