Two Days with GitLab Duo Agentic Platform

The GitLab Duo Agentic Platform (DAP) workshop/bootcamp took place on 24-25 June 2026.

GitLab Duo Agentic Platform (DAP) was a workshop/bootcamp where GitLab DAP technical architects and engineers wanted to exhibit/train us on their new DAP feature in GitLab. The event was focused on DevOps engineers and developers in general. The event took place at Codecentric Tech Base in Solingen, a small industrial town next to Düsseldorf.

You know it’s a developers’ meeting when everyone is in T-shirts and shorts, with their laptop face lacking space for any new sticker.

Representing our team, Volker and I joined the workshop. We didn’t let DB ruin our motivation for the day. Same as the workshop, which was in German but the slides were in English, this blog is going to be in English.

The Experience

Day 1: Introduction to GitLab DAP

GitLab Sales Manager Mathias introduced the DAP platform. He explained its ability to integrate developers and AI together in the CI/CD cycle. It is evident that AI alone is prone to security issues and has a development bottleneck, and a CI/CD cycle without AI leads to the loss of productive man-hours and a slower development cycle.

GitLab DAP involves both developers and AI agents in every part of the cycle, trying to get the best out of both, where humans help AI and AI helps humans. The AI agents are customizable, and you can have a hand on your AI agents with “chat-rules.md”, “AGENTS.md”, and “SKILL.md” within your GitLab project. Also, users can use built-in AI agents. He was explaining other major features that are DAP-specific and are not available to GitLab Premium users.

Breaks and Venue Experience

Codecentric had a self-service canteen hall. Refrigerators were filled with caffeine drinks and fruits. The coffee machine was mediocre; this sentence comes from a coffee addict.

Architecture and Use Cases

After the coffee break came my favourite part. Patrick Hynes gave a presentation about the architectural motive behind DAP and some use cases that they dealt with. This presentation addressed the technical nuances that developers face while using AI in their work and how DAP tries to avoid them by giving developers a hand on AI in multiple places.

Tool Exploration and Evening Wrap-Up

The whole afternoon involved us going through each DAP-specific tool and option and how they aid developers in certain cases. The day ended with us ordering pizza to the event location. For a small town like Solingen, the pizza was extraordinary. I didn’t expect I could get a delicious Neapolitan pizza on the outskirts of a city.

We had a nice socializing S-Bahn ride back to Düsseldorf to our hotel and were brain-dead with all the information that I tried to stuff into my head the whole day.

Day 2: Hands-On Testing

Things got serious now. Day 2 was exclusively hands-on testing of DAP. Every one of us was given permissions to their DAP test platform with a project and group. There was a detailed GitLab project instructing us on how to use the tools and what else we could do with them.

This was like a puzzle-solving game. While everyone’s end goal was to debug pipelines, merge requests, or introduce a new feature to their project, the usage of DAP depended on individual developers and how they liked to debug. There is never a single solution to a problem in the tech world. I think Volker liked this testing part, as he was trying to blow up the AI agent. We learned a lot about the limitations of DAP from him, as he was getting into the final thread almost every time.

Intensive Learning Experience

The puzzle game was so intensive that I was eating my lunch in silence while being surrounded by the group. I guess my brain needed it so that we could continue testing more after lunch.

Quiz and Closing Session

The last part of the day was a “non-competitive quiz” program based on DAP, while the organizers gave trophies to the top three winners. It was a funny quiz program, as even the organizers were not ready for certain questions and almost everyone was caught off guard, despite it being non-competitive.

Conclusions

Overall, the two-day workshop was an intensive and interesting event. This event left me excited to work with DAP with my customers and try to bring them to the front line of the development wave in their respective industries.

We left with a few goodies/stickers from GitLab. Now I need to remove old stickers from my laptop face to replace them with new ones.

Author: Ritheesh Thiruppathi (rkthiruppathi@knowmadmood.de)