How Claude helps reduce our technical debtHow Claude helps reduce our technical debt

Over the past few months I've been experimenting with making our AI agents autonomous. One area that kept coming up was dependency management. Renovate does a great job of opening pull requests, but somebody still has to review, fix and merge them.<br>At the AI scale up I work for, we heavily use Claude with Slack as our main communication tool. With Anthropic's recently introduced Claude tag, I wondered how many of our Renovate PRs could be delegated.<br>The interesting part is that every channel effectively becomes a long-lived workspace with its own memory. That makes it possible to build workflows that improve over time. This looked like the missing piece that could automate a lot of our pull requests.

Renovate pull requests<br>If this is your first time hearing about Renovate bot, you should definitely check it out, it's an amazing tool that keeps your dependencies up to date. Over the years our codebase has grown with many libraries that require constant effort of updating them. It's a recurring engineering work.<br>As a team, we've built a process around it, the pull requests get automatically assigned, engineers check them, and we discuss them in our dailys. We also auto-merge a lot of them but on some days it feels like fighting the mythical Hydra - merge one dependency update and two more appear.<br>Luckily for us we have our own Claude champion ready to face the Hydra of dependencies and decrease our maintenance burden.

How it works<br>Our first step was to create a channel dedicated to Renovate pull requests where we instructed Claude on the task. Next up we linked the channel with Github so that every time Renovate creates a pull request, it's posted to the channel.<br>The core logic sits in our dependency-update-routine skill. Different dependencies require different levels of effort. Our goal is simple - let Claude handle as much of that work as possible.<br>Our skill instructs Claude to:<br>Calculate a merge confidence by reading the changelog, inspecting our codebase, and looking at previous updates for that dependency. High-confidence pull requests are approved and merged automatically, while lower-confidence ones are left for manual review.<br>Apply dependency-specific update templates. For example Playwright requires changes across multiple files<br>Deploy the pull request to staging environment<br>Handle major version upgrades by inspecting the changelog and adapting our codebase<br>Fix failing tests<br>Assigns a team member for manual review when required<br>Even when a manual review is still required, Claude can do most of the heavy lifting. If it fixes the tests, deploys to staging, and gets the pull request into a green state before an engineer even looks at it, that's already a huge time saver.

Results and next steps<br>Early results are promising. Out of 70 Renovate PRs in the past 2 weeks our agent completed 21 of them without human intervention. There is still plenty of room for improvement because Claude Tag still has a few limitations.<br>For example, Claude has limited access to GitHub so it can't run a deployment pipeline directly. For now Claude asks the user to do this. Getting rid of this manual step is a nice challenge for the upcoming period. 30% is a good starting point, but we're aiming higher.