EY hit 4x coding productivity by connecting AI agents to engineering standards

Coding agents can generate thousands of lines of code in minutes. The problem: most of it can't be deployed. It breaks internal standards, fails compliance checks, or creates more cleanup work than it saves.

"You can generate a ton of code, but it doesn't mean really anything, right? It's got to be code that is integratable, that is compliant, and you don't want to create more work on the back end just because you sped up the code generation process on the front end," said Stephen Newman, EY Global CTO Engineering Leader.

EY's product development team solved this by connecting coding agents to their engineering standards, code repositories, and compliance frameworks. The result: 4x to 5x productivity gains across teams building EY's suite of audit, tax, and financial platforms.

But the gains didn't come from just turning on a tool. Newman's team ...