AI made writing code dramatically faster, but the work between opening a merge request and merging it has stayed almost entirely manual. Assigning reviewers, addressing feedback round after round, untangling conflicts, rebasing before merge — each step still requires a developer's attention. The bottleneck moved but the tools didn't adapt. GitLab 19.0 changes that. Developer Flow now extends across the full MR lifecycle: a single AI agent that addresses reviewer feedback, resolves conflicts on long-running branches, researches unfamiliar codebases, and splits MRs that grew too large. Paired with autonomous merge conflict resolution and one-click rebase and merge, it cuts the manual work between opening an MR and merging it. Developer Flow is part of a new category of AI coding tools. The first wave accelerated the next line of code. The second wave gave developers a chat window. What's emerging now is different: agents that participate across the work, not for a fixed moment.…