Introducing Nova, our internal platform for coding agents

Coding agents are becoming an important part of software development. Their most obvious use is helping developers write code faster. But code is only one part of building and operating software. At Dropbox scale, agents also need to work within a large monorepo, validate code changes in Dropbox’s full engineering environment, and incorporate context from across the engineering lifecycle. Developers don’t just write code, after all—our engineers manage migrations, unblock CI, investigate failures, and handle repetitive operational work. This work matters, but it is often repetitive and disruptive, pulling engineers’ focus away from deeper product and infrastructure work.

Coding agents are becoming an important part of software development. Their most obvious use is helping developers write code faster. But code is only one part of building and operating software. At Dropbox scale, agents also need to work within a large monorepo, validate code changes in Dropbox’s full engineering environment, and incorporate context from across the engineering lifecycle. Developers don’t just write code, after all—our engineers manage migrations, unblock CI, investigate failures, and handle repetitive operational work. This work matters, but it is often repetitive and disruptive, pulling engineers’ focus away from deeper product and infrastructure work.

To prepare for a future where agents can assist engineers with a larger share of their work, we built Nova, an internal service for running coding agents in our cloud. Nova lets engineers run multiple coding sessions in parallel and lets internal systems use AI agents as part of automated workflows. This platform approach lets us apply agents across internal workflows instead of building one-off implementations for each use case, making it easier to rapidly experiment with how AI can support engineering work.

To prepare for a future where agents can assist engineers with a larger share of their work, we built Nova, an internal service for running coding agents in our cloud. No...