Delivery Hero's coding agent merges 1,800 pull requests in Q1

Delivery Hero’s SVP of Tech Foundations, Rodrigo, reported that the company’s autonomous software engineering system, HeroGen, merged 1,800 pull requests in the first quarter of 2026. This figure represents 18 times the conservative target of 100 merged PRs set by the team. The system, built as a harness around coding models, integrates with CI tests, GitHub, and Jira. It was launched to test users in January 2026 following the arrival of strong models in late 2025. The merge rate started above 60% in January and reached 83% by September, with most PRs being one-shots that required no additional engineer commands.

To address review bottlenecks, Delivery Hero is implementing PR classification to auto-approve low-risk changes and enhancing DevOps practices like canary rollouts with automated rollback. Rodrigo predicts that by the end of next year, the system will operate end-to-end from ticket to production, including agents handling a percentage of operational incidents automatically. The company has also transitioned from a decentralized experimentation phase to a centralized AI coding stack for its 1,500 central engineers in Berlin. This shift was driven by the need for governance, compliance, security, and cost control, as tracking usage and ROI across a dozen different providers was difficult. The company standardized on Claude for its central teams, while other subsidiaries, such as its South American company, use Gemini. Cost management is handled via the Claude API, where limits are set per organizational unit and individual. Engineers requesting additional budget must provide context on their work to justify the expense. Rodrigo noted that early adoption was limited to a 10-20% power user group, but centralization has helped push broader adoption and upskilling.