Building a Self-Driving Dev Team: Project Lightspeed and the Future of Autonomous Delivery

Details

Client: Alto Apto

Project Duration: 1 Month

Project: Fully Automated Development Team – Project Lightspeed

What if your dev team ran at AI speed — with human oversight?

We’re building the future of software delivery with Project Lightspeed: a hybrid system that blends LLM-powered engineering with the safety of human review. Whether you’re scaling support, accelerating product cycles, or exploring agentic workflows —
we can help you get there faster.

The Context: Internal Innovation at Alto Apto

Project Lightspeed began as a bold internal experiment: could we use AI to rethink the way software is delivered — not just enhanced by humans, but co-created at scale?

The rise of Codex and LLM-based code generation presented a unique opportunity to 10x delivery velocity without growing headcount. Initially aimed at scaling managed services support, Lightspeed has since evolved into a fully autonomous development pipeline — one that can turn a user story into deployed, testable code in under 10 minutes.

The Opportunity

Speed and human availability are constant constraints in traditional software delivery. Even the best teams are bound by review cycles, handovers, and context switching.

Lightspeed reframes the bottleneck. By reducing reliance on developer hours, it unlocks new possibilities for:

  • Faster prototyping
  • Rapid, automated bug fixes
  • Streamlined product builds
  • 24/7 managed services response

Our Solution

Project Lightspeed is an end-to-end agentic development pipeline built on:

  • Jira Automation for story triage
  • GPT-4 / Codex for development plan synthesis and code generation
  • GitHub Actions for CI/CD automation
  • A human-in-the-loop review model for safety, quality, and validation

Here’s how it works:

  1. A user story is moved into “Ready for Dev” in Jira

  2. Lightspeed automatically generates a detailed development plan

  3. A principal developer reviews and approves the plan

  4. Codex generates the required code based on the plan

  5. The principal developer reviews the code and merges it if approved

  6. CI/CD pipelines deploy the code into test or production environments

The result is a radically compressed lifecycle that still meets high standards for quality, safety, and traceability.

Results & Impact

Project Lightspeed is already powering Alto Apto’s internal development and managed service offerings — helping teams ship fixes and features in minutes, not days.

Lightspeed has already delivered a 90% reduction in time to implement new features, with increased code quality and consistency across the board.

While the system is not yet fully autonomous, it provides clear leverage: the AI handles the heavy lifting, while humans retain strategic oversight. Future enhancements include automated testing integration and expanded domain generalisation.

Looking Forward

This project proves more than technical feasibility — it validates Alto Apto’s role in the next wave of software delivery. We’re not just building tools. We’re redefining what a “team” can be.

Project Lightspeed is now being productised as part of our broader vision to transform the way software is scoped, built, and deployed — not by replacing people, but by radically amplifying what small teams can accomplish.