Google has introduced Project Oscar, a new open-source platform designed to help development teams create AI agents for managing software programs.
Announced during Google I/O Bangalore, Project Oscar is aimed at helping software product teams monitor issues and bugs in their projects. While currently tailored for open-source initiatives, Google hints that it may extend to closed-source projects in the future.
“I truly believe that AI has the potential to transform the entire software development lifecycle in many positive ways,” stated Karthik Padmanabhan, Lead Developer Relations at Google India, in a blog post. “We’re sharing a sneak peek into AI agents we’re working on as part of our quest to make AI even more helpful and accessible to all developers.”
Through Project Oscar, developers can build AI agents to assist at various stages of the software development lifecycle. These agents can range from developer agents to planning agents, runtime agents, or support agents. Notably, they can interact through natural language, enabling users to give instructions without needing to modify any code.
Cameron Balahan, Group Product Manager for Google’s open-source programming language Go, explained that Oscar is currently deployed on the Go project to help manage bug reports and other contributor engagements.
“With over 93,000 commits and 2,000 contributors, tracking all the issues that could arise is extremely challenging,” Balahan said in a video released by Google. “We wondered if AI agents could help, not by writing code which we truly enjoy, but by reducing disruptions and toil.”
The Go project employs an AI agent developed through Project Oscar that takes issue reports and “enriches issue reports by reviewing this data or invoking development tools to surface the information that matters most.” This agent can also interact with the person reporting the issue to clarify details, even if human maintainers are unavailable.
Balahan noted that Project Oscar will soon be available for other open-source projects from Google.
“Our vision is that anyone can deploy Oscar to their project, open or closed source, and use the agents that come pre-packaged or bring their own,” he added.
