Google brings AI agent platform Project Oscar open source

Google has announced Project Oscar, a way for open-source development teams to use and build agents to manage software programs. 

Project Oscar, announced during Google I/O Bangalore, is an open-source platform that can help software product teams monitor issues or bugs. Right now, Oscar is geared toward open-source projects, but it may also be released to manage 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,” Karthik Padmanabhan, lead Developer Relations at Google India, said 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 create AI agents that function throughout the software development lifecycle. These agents can range from a developer agent to a planning agent, runtime agent, or support agent. The agents can interact through natural language, so users can give instructions to them without needing to redo any code. 

Cameron Balahan, group product manager for Google’s open-source programming language Go, said Oscar is deployed on the project now to help the Go development team keep track of bug reports and other contributor engagements. 

Balahan said the Go project has over 93,000 commits and 2,000 contributors, making it extremely difficult to keep track of all the issues that could arise. 

“We wondered if AI agents could help, not by writing code which we truly enjoy, but by reducing disruptions and toil,” Balahan said in a video released by Google. 

Go uses 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.” The agent also interacts with whoever reports an issue to clarify anything, even if human maintainers are not online. 

Balahan said Project Oscar will soon be deployed to 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 said. 

VentureBeat reported that AI agents have started to change software development. Coding assistants, a fast-growing sector that includes GitHub Copilot and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, have been found to increase developer productivity. Other AI assistants, like Amazon’s Q, help users query their internal data or collaborate with other teams.