Claude agents added Db2 in under two days. Oracle took 9 months
Adding Oracle to a database migration tool took 9 months and about $160K. A pipeline of Claude coding agents, run like a teaching hospital, added IBM Db2 in less than two days for $4172 in tokens.
Done withClaudeSpotted· by Cockroach Labs team· Oct 20, 2026
Result No human reviewed the Db2 code yet; that check is underway
“Db2 took less than two days, and no human wrote any of the code. The token bill was $4172: 164x faster, and 38x cheaper.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Cockroach Labs built a pipeline of Claude coding agents modeled on a teaching hospital, with roles like Fellow, Review Attending, Charge Nurse, and a human Chief, to review and gate every change before it reaches the main branch. They opened a single GitHub issue asking their migration tool, MOLT, to support migrating from IBM Db2. A planning agent decomposed the issue into sub-issues with a dependency graph covering the schema converter, Fetch, Verify, and more.
How it went
Db2 support was built in less than two days with no human writing any of the code, against 9 months and about $160K for Oracle support in 2024. The token bill was $4172, which they put at 164x faster and 38x cheaper. The sprint opened thirty-two sub-issues, merged twenty-seven pull requests and sent work back fifty-five times. They are still confirming the Db2 support is correct, since no one reviewed the code the hospital wrote during that test.
Try it yourself with Claude
Set up a pipeline of coding agents (such as Claude) with distinct roles for planning, implementation, and review, where a reviewer must approve a written plan before any code is written and a separate agent audits that the review happened properly before a change can merge. Have it decompose a large request such as '[add support for X]' into smaller sub-issues with a dependency graph, and require escalation to a human whenever an agent is stuck or in disagreement.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
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