loveholidays turns every employee into a developer with Codex

Online travel agency loveholidays, operating in 8 European countries, is democratizing software development across the company by adopting Codex. This allows engineers to focus on more complex problems, while non-developer teams such as product managers and designers are directly contributing to the codebase.

Dmitri Lerko, Head of Engineering, stated that "everyone has become a builder," emphasizing that application changes and code deployments are no longer activities exclusive to engineers. Mike Jones, CTO, revealed that the company's vision is to build 'general intelligence for travel' by combining technology and human expertise.

The most prominent example is Search Playground. This eliminated the prototyping process that previously relied on the engineering priority queue, enabling employees across the business to turn ideas into working customer experiences. As a result, more than 10 new search experiences were developed, with 3 already live. The marketing team also used Codex to build interactive microsites in hours without relying on external agencies.

The same principle applies to data platform and infrastructure management. The engineering team encoded best practices and validation procedures into workflows to guide other users via Codex. Consequently, the rate of AI-assisted code changes surged from 7% to 79% in one year, and AI-assisted deployment frequency increased by 73% without adding to the engineering headcount. The success rate of data platform changes also improved from 58% to 93%.