Type: url
Original: https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2026/08/agentic-engineering-at-zalando-a-snapshot.html
Status: generated
Summary
A firsthand retrospective on two and a half years of agentic engineering across more than 250 engineering teams at Zalando, written by an Executive Principal Engineer. It describes the LiteLLM-based multi-provider API proxy the company deployed in January 2024 and the chat UI and CLI built around it, its deliberate refusal to mandate a single coding tool, and what it observed in its own data: growing pull-request sizes since the Sonnet 4 release, inflection points in cyclomatic complexity when coding agents entered a codebase, and a risk-based PR approval bot that auto-approves 33% of PRs and is reported to have cut lead time by 20-40%. It closes on governance through existing mechanisms such as the Tech Radar, and on the knowledge-sharing formats — an LLM guild, hackathons, GenAI Labs and monthly trainings — the company settled on.