# orosz-salmon-klaric-ramp-inspect-coding-agent-2026-08-25

## Veille

*Deepdive* by **Gergely Orosz**, **Jessica Salmon**, and **Ivan Klaric** in *The Pragmatic Engineer*, published on **August 25, 2026**, based on interviews with Ramp's CTO **Rahul Sengottuvelu**, head of engineering **Hamid Dadkhah**, and **Zach Bruggeman**, founding engineer of **Inspect**. Paywalled article: the note covers the public portion (sections 1 through 3 and the opening of section 4; detailed architecture, sandbox internals, and collaboration remain behind the paywall).

## Titre Article

Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect

## Date

2026-08-25

## URL

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-ramp-built-inspect

## Keywords

background coding agent, background coding agent, in-house coding agent, build vs buy, Ramp, Inspect, OpenCode, remote sandbox, remote development environment, Modal, Cloudflare Durable Objects, Cloudflare Agents SDK, screenshot-based verification, feedback loop, internal integrations, MCP, agent platform, ReviewBuddy, Oncall Assistant, Ramp Research, bugfix from Slack, model agnosticism, Minions, Goose

## Authors

Gergely Orosz, Jessica Salmon, Ivan Klaric — *The Pragmatic Engineer* (newsletter Substack de Gergely Orosz).

## Ton

Engineering journalism piece, built on interviews with Inspect's technical leadership and founding team. The text starts from an explicit question (why build when market offerings exist) and addresses it through narrative: adoption figures, reasons for the choice, the v1/v2 history, use cases illustrated with interface screenshots. The register is favorable to the subject: the authors judge the extension into a platform *"clever"* and suggest that the adage *"buy, don't build"* may not apply to AI tools. The figures come from Ramp and are not checked against an external source. The text places Inspect among other internal agents (Goose at Block, Minions at Stripe, River at Shopify) and references earlier newsletter content (Claude Code, a podcast with OpenCode's creator).

## Pense-betes

- **Inspect**: Ramp's *background* coding agent, opened internally in November 2025; free choice of tooling, yet **75%** of merged PRs come from it (~60% in January 2026).
- **Two claimed differences** from Claude Code or Cursor: remote sandboxes (unlimited session concurrency, centralized configuration, collaboration) and internal integrations — *"the only constraint on agents' ability is model intelligence"*.
- **Closing the loop**: backend = tests, telemetry, feature flags; frontend = screenshots and previews. Screenshot-based verification existed at Ramp before third-party tools.
- **v1 → v2**: a Chrome extension for visual editing aimed at designers, not adopted (local setup, little interest for engineers); pivot to a remote environment with an agent.
- **OpenCode** chosen as the harness: open source, HTTP API, *"good enough"*, model-agnostic.
- **Figures**: provisioned environment startup in **under 5 s**; team of **5.5** people; **150+** contributors; **~90%** of PRs in the Inspect repo and **80%+** of its code written by Inspect; **1 million** sessions in July 2026.
- **Use cases**: small and medium *one-shot* tasks, `@inspect fix this` in Slack, debugging (debugger, sanitized read-only production replica, Snowflake).
- **Agents built on top**: ReviewBuddy (code review, one engineer-week), Oncall Assistant, Testo (Playwright tests), Ramp Research, Voice of the Customer, draft PRs from Sentry/Datadog.
- **Announced stack**: React/Vite, Cloudflare Durable Objects, SQLite, Cloudflare Agents SDK, Modal; sandbox with Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, Temporal, Chromium, VS Code Server.
- Related to [[how-claude-code-is-built-pragmatic-engineer-2025-09-15]].

## RésuméDe400mots

The Pragmatic Engineer devotes a deepdive to Inspect, the in-house coding agent of fintech Ramp, based on interviews with CTO Rahul Sengottuvelu, head of engineering Hamid Dadkhah, and founding engineer Zach Bruggeman. The authors note that a few companies write most of their code with their own agent: Goose at Block, Minions at Stripe, River at Shopify. They ask: why build when Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot already exist?

Inspect is a background agent opened internally in November 2025. Engineers remain free to choose their own tools, but 75% of merged PRs now come from Inspect sessions, up from about 60% in January. The tool stands out on two points. It runs in remote sandboxes, which removes the limit on parallel sessions, centralizes configuration, and enables collaboration. It has the same integrations as a Ramp engineer, so that only the model's intelligence bounds the agent. It verifies its own changes: tests, telemetry, and feature flags on the backend, screenshots and previews on the frontend — a capability built before third-party tools offered it.

Three reasons motivated building it in-house: local machines only allowed one or two Claude Code sessions, the web team wanted frontend tooling for designers, and growing complexity called for remote development environments. The v1, a Chrome extension where you designated a page area to modify, was not adopted: engineers already knew how to edit a file, and the local setup put off non-developers. v2 pivoted to a remote environment with an agent layered on top, relying on OpenCode, an open-source harness exposing an HTTP API and agnostic to the model. Adoption then rose sharply.

Current figures: under 5 seconds to start a provisioned environment, a team of 5.5 people, more than 150 internal contributors, one million sessions passed in July, and more than 80% of Inspect written in Inspect sessions.

Use cases cover small and medium coding tasks, fixing bugs from a Slack thread, and debugging with queries against a sanitized production replica and against Snowflake. More than 200 internal agents run on the platform: ReviewBuddy for code review, Oncall Assistant for incidents, Testo to generate Playwright tests, Ramp Research as a data analyst, Voice of the Customer, and draft PRs created from Sentry or Datadog alerts.

The architectural principle: give agents the same context and the same tools as engineers. The rest, paywalled, details the stack (Cloudflare Durable Objects, Agents SDK, Modal) and the sandbox.

## GrapheDeConnaissance

- Gergely Orosz —publie→ article Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect (DOCUMENT, 0.98)
- Jessica Salmon —publie→ article Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect (DOCUMENT, 0.97)
- Ivan Klaric —publie→ article Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect (DOCUMENT, 0.97)
- Ramp —a_créé→ Inspect (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.98)
- Zach Bruggeman —a_créé→ Inspect (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.92)
- Rahul Sengottuvelu —travaille_chez→ Ramp (ORGANISATION, 0.96)
- Inspect —est_instance_de→ agent de codage en arrière-plan (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.95)
- Inspect —utilise→ OpenCode (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.96)
- Inspect —utilise→ Modal (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.9)
- Inspect —utilise→ Cloudflare Durable Objects (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.9)
- Inspect —utilise→ Cloudflare Agents SDK (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.9)
- Inspect —mesure→ 75 % des PR fusionnées chez Ramp en mai 2026 (~60 % en janvier) (MESURE, 0.96)
- Inspect —mesure→ environnement de dev provisionné en moins de 5 secondes ; 1 million de sessions en juillet 2026 (MESURE, 0.94)
- Inspect —permet→ vérification par captures d'écran (METHODOLOGIE, 0.92)
- sandbox distant —permet→ sessions d'agents parallèles illimitées (CONCEPT, 0.9)
- Inspect —concurrence→ Claude Code (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.8)
- ReviewBuddy —est_basé_sur→ Inspect (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.94)
- Ramp Research —est_basé_sur→ Inspect (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.92)
- Oncall Assistant —est_basé_sur→ Inspect (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.92)
- Ramp —affirme_que→ les agents doivent avoir accès au même contexte et aux mêmes outils que les ingénieurs (AFFIRMATION, 0.94)
- Gergely Orosz —affirme_que→ la convention « buy, don't build » pourrait ne pas s'appliquer aux outils d'IA (AFFIRMATION, 0.88)
- article Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect —référence→ Minions (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.9)
- article Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect —référence→ Goose (TECHNOLOGIE, 0.9)

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Canonical: https://www.thekb.eu/en/fiches/orosz-salmon-klaric-ramp-inspect-coding-agent-2026-08-25/