Originally posted on LinkedIn.
We plugged bugs into the software factory. Every night the agentic loop works through open bug tickets, fixes them, and opens PRs. The first thing engineers do in the morning is go through the queue. Most go through without comment.
The non-obvious part is that this only works if ticket quality is high. The number one reason a bug can't be fixed is that it's vague about what the expected behavior should be. That isn't an agent problem. Those are the same tickets that would have taken rounds of back and forth with a human developer. We automated the ticket quality check, so now the gap gets caught at intake instead of after someone picks it up.
I wrote before about each major area being owned by one or two engineers. In the pre-AI world that headcount plus this bug load meant nothing below P1 ever got touched. Like most teams, we had a standing backlog of P2s and P3s nobody was realistically going to reach. Now P0 through P3 are all handled within SLA, and the whole review takes about as long as a cup of coffee.
One casualty: we used to celebrate a bug fix champion of the week. The auto fixer took it the first week we turned it on and hasn't given it back since. Three weeks running, no human close.
The real point is that bugs were a plug-in. Once you have a factory that turns Jira tickets into high-quality features, you can point it at a lot of different kinds of work. That's the leverage: not any one automation, but everything that becomes possible once the machine exists.