Cockroach Labs' MOLT tool migrated from IBM Db2 in under two days using AI agents, costing just $4,172—164x faster and 38x cheaper than the 9-month, $160K Oracle migration in 2024. The effort began with a single GitHub issue, decomposed into 32 sub-issues by a planning agent, with 27 pull requests merged and 55 review cycles. No human wrote the code.
The system, dubbed MOLT Sinai, models software development as a hospital: issues are patients, merging is discharge, and humans act as Chiefs of Medicine. Unlike throughput-optimized systems like Gas Town or Cursor’s SQLite experiment, MOLT Sinai prioritizes quality over speed, ensuring production-grade, well-tested code. Test coverage matched PostgreSQL standards.
The framework includes schema converters, Fetch/Verify paths, ANTLR grammar, and CI Docker images. Two issues were escalated to humans. The approach reflects a broader shift toward agentic software factories, but Cockroach’s model uniquely balances automation with rigorous oversight, ensuring reliability in customer-facing database migrations.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing