Feedback issue: GitLab Duo Onboarding Guide (Experimental)

Welcome to the GitLab Duo Onboarding Guide (Experimental) 🚀

The purpose of this feedback issue is to collect your experiences with the Onboarding Guide, an AI-powered onboarding agent for GitLab. Our goal is to understand how it's helping (or hindering) your onboarding and adoption journey, identify bugs and gaps, and prioritize improvements based on real usage. Your feedback will directly influence how we evolve this agent from Experimental to Beta and GA.

Experimental availability

  • Available on GitLab.com (SaaS), Premium and Ultimate
  • Accessible in the Duo Chat side panel and supported IDEs
  • The agent is read-only — it guides, explains, and recommends; it does not create or modify anything in your project
What is the Onboarding Guide?

The Onboarding Guide is a specialized agent in the Duo Agent Platform that acts like a personal onboarding expert. It reads your project and subscription context to deliver a personalized, phased adoption path across the GitLab DevSecOps lifecycle — from source control and CI/CD through security, compliance, and planning — and points you to the right docs, tutorials, and next steps for your role and tier.

What it can help with
  • Getting started on GitLab and mapping familiar concepts from GitHub / Jenkins / Bitbucket to GitLab
  • Recommending a personalized, phased adoption path based on what you've already set up
  • Setting up CI/CD, security scanning (SAST, secret detection, dependency/container scanning), compliance, and planning — tailored to your tier
  • Explaining features and surfacing capabilities you may not know you have
  • Suggesting concrete next steps and the relevant documentation, tutorials, and training

Current limitations:

  • Read-only — it recommends and drafts guidance but does not make changes for you
  • Personalized to what it can read about your project and tier; it may not know details outside that context
  • Focused on GitLab onboarding and adoption — for unrelated questions, use Duo Chat directly

🎯 Feedback we're especially interested in

  1. Accuracy: Does it understand your project and tier context correctly?
  2. Usefulness: Which responses save you time vs. create more work?
  3. Relevance: Is the recommended path right for your role and where you are in adoption?
  4. Coverage: What onboarding tasks or questions couldn't it help with?
  5. Tone & length: Is the guidance clear and appropriately concise?

📝 How to give feedback

  1. Check existing threads below to see if your point is already raised — add a 👍 or a comment.
  2. Start a new thread with a descriptive title (e.g., "Security scanning setup skipped Ultimate policies").
  3. Include context:
    • Your prompt to the Onboarding Guide
    • The response you received
    • What you expected vs. what happened
    • URLs or screenshots (sanitized as needed)
  4. Rate the response: on a scale of 1–5, how useful was it?

🤝 What you can expect from us

  1. We will read all feedback during the experimental period.
  2. We will prioritize fixes and improvements based on feedback patterns.
  3. We will create issues for reproducible problems.
  4. We may reach out for clarification on complex reports.

🐛 Known limitations

  • The agent may occasionally mention an action it can't take — it's read-only, so it guides you through changes rather than making them.
  • It may not recognize every custom configuration or workflow.

Thank you for helping us make the Onboarding Guide a genuinely useful first experience on GitLab! Your feedback during the experimental period is what shapes the Beta and GA releases.