GitLab hosted the Transcend Hackathon, giving 1,576 developers access to GitLab Orbit — a live, queryable graph of code, merge requests, pipelines, deployments, and ownership. Participants shipped 265 Showcase Track projects and 26 contributors merged 61 improvements into the Orbit codebase. The most common theme: answering 'what does this change break?' in one graph query instead of hours of manual digging. Winning projects included Sankofa (blast-radius analysis, issue briefing, and CVE tracing via three agents), Carver (legacy migration cost estimation from the dependency graph), CrossCut (CI test selection based on call-graph traversal, cutting CI payload by 90%+), and Transcend (semantic web reasoning on top of Orbit using OWL, SPARQL, and RDF). Agents access Orbit via MCP; engineers query it directly through the Data Explorer.
