Introducing Nova, our internal platform for coding agents - Dropbox

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Introducing Nova, our internal platform for coding agents

// By Mike White

and Kevin Altschuler • May 21, 2026

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.

In this post, we’ll share why we built Nova, why we chose a platform approach instead of multiple single-purpose solutions, and what we’ve learned from using it across the software development lifecycle.

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Tackling the fragmented workflow problem

The software development lifecycle has many places where engineering judgment matters, but the work itself can be repetitive and time-consuming. Debugging failures, updating dependencies, improving test coverage, and fixing flaky tests are critical to software development. At the same time, these tasks can distract from more meaningful work. Many of these workflows are also well suited for AI assistance through coding agents, though they do not all require the same kind of interaction. Some tasks work best through standard interactive chat, while others can run autonomously in async workflows and only surface results when an agent makes a useful discovery. Supporting both modes consistently requires more than a single-purpose tool.

At Dropbox scale, the development environment creates requirements that off-the-shelf tools are not designed to support. Our large monorepo depends on Bazel—a build and test tool that uses caching and remote execution—along with on-premise infrastructure to keep builds and tests fast. Third-party coding agent tools work well for local iteration, but they do not naturally fit a setup that depends on our repository shape, infrastructure, and validation paths. Because our development workflow depends on Dropbox-specific infrastructure and validation paths, we wanted coding agents to operate within those systems rather than introducing a separate AI-specific workflow.

Those requirements pushed us toward building a platform instead of separate solutions for each workflow. The goal was a shared system that could support interactive development, background jobs, and internal services while keeping execution, validation, and context handling consistent. To support those workflows, we built Nova.

Improving development with Nova

Nova began with a focused problem: helping engineers respond to continuous integration failures with suggested fixes. That starting point was essential to shaping the platform. Each Nova session runs in an isolated environment with a snapshot of the Dropbox codebase from a specific commit. The caller provides the task and can optionally include validation commands to run after the agent finishes. If validation fails, for example because a test does not pass or a build breaks, Nova can continue the session, feed the results back to the agent, and ask it to address the failure. This keeps the agent grounded in the real build and test environment instead of stopping after generating a plausible-looking patch. The workflow follows a simple pattern: propose a change, validate it, and continue only if the results hold up.

Over time, we expanded the platform to support multiple coding agents behind the same interface. Nova integrates into the tools and workflows engineers already use, including a web interface for interactive sessions similar to other cloud-based coding agents. Engineers can also use a command-line interface and API to launch jobs in parallel from locally running agents, scripts, and internal services. To support longer-running workflows, we maintain...