TechVoices

VIDEO PODCAST

GitLab's Manav Khurana: AI Agents, Orbit, and the Future of Coding

James Maguire

June 10, 2026

AI is dramatically increasing developer productivity, but many companies are struggling to translate those gains into measurable business outcomes. In a TechVoices interview, GitLab Chief Product and Marketing Officer Manav Khurana explained that AI-assisted coding is creating unprecedented speed, but also introducing new issues around reliability, security, governance, infrastructure scale, and cost control.

He outlined GitLab’s approach to the agentic engineering era, including Orbit, a lifecycle context graph designed to give AI agents better enterprise context, along with new governance and platform controls intended to help companies gain agentic speed without losing enterprise oversight.

Core Takeaways

Developer Productivity Gap

AI tools are helping developers move faster, but enterprises are not always seeing the same gains because AI-generated work can create reliability, security, governance, and cost challenges.

Context Is Critical

GitLab Orbit creates a digital twin of the software environment, giving AI agents richer context so they can work faster, use fewer tokens, and produce more accurate results.

Enterprise Control Layer

GitLab positions its platform as a gatekeeper between AI agents and enterprise code, enforcing permissions, policies, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop controls.

Developers Still Matter

Khurana argues that AI will change the developer role, but not eliminate it, because humans will be needed for architecture, design, orchestration, governance, and customer-value decisions.

KEY QUOTES

The Productivity Paradox

When we survey our customers, survey developers, we're finding 90% plus of developers are using two or more tools, reporting much higher productivity and speed in their daily jobs. In fact, we've seen our customer code bases grow as much as five times over a year.

But that speed is also bringing chaos. We see the chaos in terms of reliability incidents in the industry or security incidents in the industry or agents hallucinating and showing up with artificial confidence. And that leaves it on all of us to then figure out where did the agents go wrong?

Orbit and the Power of Context

Orbit is a digital twin of a GitLab instance that has all the relevant information stitched together. So instead of doing 200,000 lookups, you do one lookup and all the relationships are available right away.

There's an adage in the AI world, which is AI agents work as well as the context that they're given. This is really about that context component that we are fixing.

GitLab as the AI Gatekeeper

When an agent wants to read a code base, it must go through GitLab. When an agent has to write to a code base, it must go through GitLab.

Because we sit in the middle as the gatekeeper, that's why we are able to provide that level of control.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Maguire

Executive Director

An award-winning journalist, James has held top editorial roles in several leading technology publications, covering enterprise trends in cloud computing, AI, data analytics, cybersecurity and more. He regularly communicates with industry analysts and experts and has interviewed hundreds of technology executives.

Cloudera's Venkat Rajaji: advantages of open source AI

Snowflake's Christian Kleinerman: AI and the speed of data access

David Linthicum: LLM trends

Extreme Networks' Nabil Bukhari: how AI democratizes technology

Komprise's Krishna Subramanian: an AI model for every task

The Productivity Paradox

Orbit and the Power of Context

GitLab as the AI Gatekeeper

Ahead of the curve, every week.

Get in touch with us.

Ahead of the curve, 
every week.