GitLab 18.8 brings a number of new features, including GitLab Duo Planner Agent, GitLab Duo Security Analyst Agent, auto-dismiss irrelevant vulnerabilities, and more. With this release, the GitLab Duo Agent Platform, enabling organizations to orchestrate AI agents, reaches general availability.
GitLab says that GitLab Duo Agent Platform helps teams coordinate agents across every phase of the development process, from planning and building to securing and shipping. The company adds that the platform addresses the AI paradox by extending AI-driven productivity beyond coding to the entire workflow, reducing bottlenecks such as a growing code review backlogs, security vulnerabilities, compliance checks, and downstream bug fixes.
To achieve this, the GitLab Duo Agent Platform brings together agentic chat, task-specific agents, workflow automation, and enterprise-grade controls, enabling organizations to deploy and manage AI across the entire development lifecycle.
The platform provides a central AI Catalog where teams can discover, manage, and share agents and flows across their organization. Built-in foundational agents like Planner, Security Analyst, and Data Analyst handle structured work at key decision points, while customizable flows automate multi-step agents and tasks in development workflows from issue to merge request, CI/CD migration, pipeline troubleshooting, and code reviews.
Developers can use the Planner agent to create, update, and analyze GitLab work items, such as backlog analysis, prioritization with frameworks like RICE or MoSCoW, and surface what requires direct intervention.
The Security Analyst Agent lets engineers manage vulnerabilities using natural language in GitLab Duo Agentic Chat, allowing them to triage, assess, and guide remediation directly through chat instead of dashboards or custom scripts.
Using vulnerability management policies, security teams can automatically dismiss vulnerabilities that don’t apply to their organization, cutting through noise and allowing developers to focus on genuine security risks. Auto-dismissed vulnerabilities are labelled accordingly in merge requests and tracked in the vulnerability report for audit purposes.
In addition to the afore mentioned AI-powered features, GitLab 18.8 also includes other enhancements, such as an improved GitLab Runner, multiple container scanning, centralized credential management API, and much more. Be sure to read the official announcement for full details.
GitLab Duo Agent Platform is not the only agent orchestration platform on the market. Competitors include Copilot Workspace, Google Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Agent 365, and others.
