GitLab 18.8 release notes

GitLab Duo Agent Platform is now generally available, bringing agentic AI orchestration across your entire software development lifecycle. Unlike AI tools that speed up individual tasks in isolation, the Agent Platform helps teams coordinate AI agents across planning, building, securing, and shipping software, closing the gap between faster individual work and the collaborative, multi-stage reality of software delivery.

The platform provides a central AI Catalog where teams can discover, manage, and share agents and flows across their organization. Built-in foundational agents like Planner, Security Analyst, and Data Analyst handle structured work at key decision points, while customizable flows automate multi-step agents and tasks in development workflows from issue to merge request, CI/CD migration, pipeline troubleshooting, and code reviews.

With governance controls, usage visibility, and flexible deployment options including self-hosted models for offline environments, organizations can adopt AI at scale with the transparency and control they need.

GitLab Premium and Ultimate users can start using the Agent Platform today on GitLab.com and GitLab Self-Managed instances with promotional GitLab Credits.

The Planner Agent is now generally available! The Planner Agent is a foundational agent built to support product managers directly in GitLab.

Use the Planner Agent to create, edit, and analyze GitLab work items. Instead of manually chasing updates, prioritizing work, or summarizing planning data, the Planner Agent helps you analyze backlogs, apply frameworks like RICE or MoSCoW, and surface what truly needs your attention. It’s like having a proactive teammate who understands your planning workflow and works with you to make better, more efficient decisions.

Please provide your feedback in issue 583008.

The GitLab Duo Security Analyst Agent, introduced as beta in GitLab 18.5, is now generally available in GitLab 18.8.

The Security Analyst Agent enables engineers to manage vulnerabilities through natural language commands in GitLab Duo Agentic Chat. Instead of manually clicking through vulnerability dashboards or writing custom scripts for bulk operations, security teams can now triage, assess, and provide guidance for vulnerabilities in Chat conversations.

As a foundational agent, the Security Analyst Agent is available by default in GitLab Duo Agentic Chat, with no manual setup required.

Security teams can now automatically dismiss vulnerabilities that don’t apply to their organization using vulnerability management policies. Dismissing vulnerabilities that are not relevant to your organization reduces noise and helps developers focus on vulnerabilities that pose actual risk.

You can create policies to auto-dismiss vulnerabilities based on:

• File path
• Directory
• Identifier (CVE, CWE, or OWASP)

Auto-dismissed vulnerabilities appear in the merge request’s security widget with an Auto-dismissed label and are tracked in the vulnerability report activity with a dismissal reason for audit purposes.