Tim Davies (Project Rising) describes HAL, an internal AI agent framework of about 15 specialized agents used alongside a UK-based developer team. HAL agents have defined roles and scopes, analyze the codebase, auto-generate wireframes for proposals, and support an automated development process that increases delivery capacity and reduces the need for a much larger human team.
Chapters
So our developers are based entirely in the uk, but we work in partnership with a series of AI agents to help our developers achieve more. These agents are wrapped in a framework which we've somewhat ironically called HAL, which, if you've watched Space 2001, you'll very much understand the reference. But essentially this is a series of interconnected agents that can do a particular role within a development organization. And so these 15 or so agents have independent job types, very specific scopes of work, and they work in combination with our developers so that we can achieve more. This is essential for us because while we're building out the toolkit and supporting our existing customer projects and the new work that's coming on all of the time, we wouldn't be able to do this with a traditional development organization. We'd probably already need 30 or 40 developers, and that would be an interesting model to run in these times. So the combination of the expert developers that we've got and HAL and our agent delivery process means that we're able to deliver far more than we would be able to. And this looks at our code base, identifies opportunities for improvement. It automatically creates wireframes for our customer projects so that we can share early versions of what a system would look like at the proposal phase, so they can get a feel for what their application might look like, how it could work, before they've even signed to say that they definitely want to work with us. And we're able to do that through our automated development process. We think there's huge potential for this in the future. We're only really getting started, but we hope that it means that we can maintain a core team of expert, highly capable, amazing developers, but working in combination with AI so that we can deliver far more. So that's how we're using agents in our development process within Project Rising. And you will probably at some point hear us refer to that as hal, although it was only really meant to be an internal name. So HAL and our agents are allowing us to deliver more great work for our customers.
