# 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.

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### 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.

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### 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.

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### 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.

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### Related pages

* [What tasks can Cosine complete end-to-end?](https://docs.cosine.sh/~/revisions/3DlxW5CLGwpfyUijhJm1/faqs/technology-and-quality/what-tasks-can-cosine-complete-end-to-end)
* [How does Cosine handle security, privacy, and IP?](https://docs.cosine.sh/~/revisions/3DlxW5CLGwpfyUijhJm1/faqs/security-and-compliance/how-does-cosine-handle-security-privacy-and-ip)

→ Next: [What are Cosine’s core features?](https://docs.cosine.sh/~/revisions/G57QESjWqGjHVFtA60NI/faqs/getting-started/what-are-cosines-core-features)