The AI Record
So then we thought, why don't we just remove ourselves from that first stage? And … do that work instead. So we did. And we gave him some instructions on how an Epic should be specified. It needs to have a description. It needs to have some acceptance criteria. … needs to have some certain level of confidence on how to implement it. And if … doesn't have that, he won't start. Then he will just ask a question back to the product owner, … him or her, and try to figure out the stuff he needs to be able to continue.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. The speaker describes the rule the bank's agent follows before it starts work on a product owner's request.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 10:47.

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year

Filed under

Who is speaking

Hallstein Brøtan, Senior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system. Works on the team that built and runs the agent he describes, so he is first-hand on how it works and what it produced; the pull request counts and cost are his own estimates from the team's own stats page, not audited, and his employer Novanet sells AI services.

How this was checked

Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-08).

Whisper matches word for word near 10:47. The '…' parts cover 'Nisko' (name), 'he' and 'tag'. The passage's 'Epic' capitalization is cosmetic.

How to cite this passage

Hallstein Brøtan (Nordic Corporate Bank), “How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank”, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, 2026-06-29, at 10:47. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8M8--12h1Y Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/nordic-corporate-bank-agent-wont-start-without-acceptance-criteria-2026

More from the same source

Also, we have a stats page where the last one is the most interesting because it shows the number of completed pull requests we've done per month for the last two years. And this blue part is after we deployed … to production. So as you can see, the amount of code that's being produced is much higher now than before. And the first month, March, the March, we completed 572 pull requests in one month. That's a pretty high number. And the year before, it was 141 with the same team, two developers.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. The speaker shows the team's monthly pull request chart and gives the figure for the first month after the agent went to production and the year-earlier figure.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 20:22.

  • 572 pull requests completed pull requests in month, March, the first month after the agent was deployed to production, as spoken. Level not stated
  • 141 pull requests completed pull requests year earlier, 'the year before', as spoken. Level not stated

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Passage page

And how much does this get cost? I don't really have a clear answer to that because he's sharing my GitHub subscription. So I think I use most of it. But I think maybe it's been costing like $100 to $200 a month maybe. And that's not, that's almost for free. But I guess that will increase now. And also we're not using the most expensive models. So that cost could go up a lot. But it's enabled us to do this.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. Asked what the autonomous agent costs, the speaker gives a rough monthly range and says it may rise.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 50:39.

  • $100 coding agent monthly cost low, per month, as spoken
  • $200 coding agent monthly cost high, per month, as spoken

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Passage page

How do we dare to do this in a bank? Well, we have the rules built in, and he doesn't have access to the customer data … And then he really tried to get the customer data. He tried to look at the … infrastructure and construct the connection string and all that, but we don't have secrets in our connection strings … managed identity to connect to the database, and his service principal … not have access to the database, so he couldn't get any data.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. Asked how the team dares to run an autonomous agent in a bank, the speaker describes a test in which he tried to get the agent to hand over production customer data.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 23:32.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Passage page

And we started building this agent. And this was in November 2025. And that was kind of the last time we've written code by hand. So after opening Visual Studio is each morning for … 20 years, I haven't really opened it after that. I even removed it from the taskbar. And it started with the deliberate choice. There was nobody kind of pushing us to do this. We just wanted to test it out first. And it kind of kept rolling.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. A consultant on the bank's two-person development team says when they started the coding agent and that they have not written code by hand since.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 03:47.

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Passage page

So as I said, doing pull requests … not an ideal situation. So we want to remove ourselves from that step to make it fully autonomous. I do think maybe that we need another like Opus 4.5 moment that LLM's, there's a new version that just is better. … But there are a lot of changes that could go straight to test. Like the document search could have gone without us approving it. But … it kind of needs to build this track record of doing stuff right before we trust it. So we're not quite there yet. But I think it's a matter of time.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. Answering a question about taking the human out of the loop, the speaker says a person still approves the agent's pull requests and what would change that.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 52:33.

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Passage page

Because before, you could probably argue that the coding part was the bottleneck in our kind of product lifecycle. But now … is doing all the coding. And when he took over the coding, we found that the requirement part, the first part, is the new bottleneck. Because me and …, we can be tied up in some prioritized work. And then a product owner creates a new feature or a feature request in an Epic in the boards. And we won't kind of look at that before some time has passed. And then we have some questions, clarifications. And the product owner might not even remember what she wanted the first place when she wrote it. And it becomes this async ping-pong where you kind of try to figure out what to do. And you're not able to begin the implementation.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. The speaker explains why, once the agent did the coding, turning a product owner's request into a workable task became the slowest step.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 09:50.

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Passage page

And then the self review, which is kind of interesting because we have this, we created this review pool. So we have one model, which is a Sonnet that does one review. … then we have kind of a … cheaper model that also does a review. And then we have the third model, … right now, it kind of consolidates this and verifies the findings in the reviews and decides if it should change something or not. And when this review pool is kind of finished and happy, … will assign it to a human.

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

Context. The speaker describes how the agent reviews its own pull request with three models before handing it to a person.

Talk: How We Built an Autonomous Development Workflow at Nordic Corporate Bank, NDC Conferences (YouTube); talk recorded at NDC in Oslo, June 29, 2026, at 37:00.

Checked against the source [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Passage page

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