Cubeia highlights the success of its fork in the code

A transformational year has seen Cubeia move completely away from traditional coding in favour of AI-assisted development

Coding has long been the backbone of modern technology, but for Stefan Grenstad, Cubeia’s Chief Operating Officer, the last few months have seen a transformational shift away from manual coding and towards AI-assisted development.

Speed to market is written into the DNA of everything platform developer Cubeia does, but AI has rewritten the rules for the company over the last year.

Cubeia was at SBC Lisbon explaining how a transformational year has seen the group move completely away from traditional coding in favour of AI-assisted development. AI tools are now the default way code gets written at Cubeia. It is built around a structured, agent-based process, not an optional add-on individual developers can choose to skip.

The results have been spectacular, with productivity up 250 per cent. 

Stefan Grenstad, Cubeia’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “In November of last year, we set ourselves a target that all of our new features and all of our new releases would be written by AI by August. We’d noticed a pattern in our Jira logs. AI-mature developerswere outperforming their senior colleagues by a huge amount, accounting for 60 per cent of our total output. The reason was that they were utilising AI. With AI multiplying individual output by such an impressive amount, the challenge wasn’t whether to adopt it but how quickly we could make it the default.”

The aim for Cubeia was to increase the company’s development output without increasing its workforce. It wanted faster prototyping and shorter feedback loops, and to build all new features and releases with AI-assisted code.

Claude is the primary LLM, with the platform built in Java with a React frontend.

 Feedback loops that would take two weeks can now ship, get tested, and be iterated on the same day,” Grenstad explained. “Human oversight on quality remains critical. The harder challenge now is making the platform agent-operable — building it so that AI agents, not just people, can operate it directly — and getting that to work cleanly with our legacy systems.

“Testing is now built into development as it happens. One senior developer who was cautious of losing control over faster releases is now one of the strongest advocates for the new way of working on the team. This is the future, now. But getting the best from it requires a team willing to change how it works.

“We’re now at the stage of organisational change,” Grenstad said. “AI is no longer a tooling challenge but an organisational one. We’ve shifted from writing code quickly to understanding the business problem well enough to direct AI toward the right solution. We have exceptionally strong engineers — and it’s precisely because we’re now so strong technically that our next step is to add more domain and business depth alongside them. It’s a complement to the talent we already have, not a replacement for it. The hard part isn’t adoption; it’s shaping the business — how the company should be structured, who we hire, and how we work with customers once coding is no longer the bottleneck. Looking ahead, that means making our platform agent-operable, which is exactly what we’re exploring with three operators right now.”

“We’re also opening up the platform further,” Grenstad added. “We’re building an SDK that lets customers connect and build their own front end — whatever they want. A lot of mainstream casinos look almost identical today; giving operators that freedom should unlock far more creativity in how their products look and feel.

“Another initiative is making our reporting interactive with AI. You can pull a GGR report and then chat with it directly to dig into the details. That one still needs some polish, but it’s essentially there.”

Elsewhere, Cubeia has just completed its biggest update to Cubeia Poker since it went into production in 2009 with a full rebuild on PixiJS, the WebGL-based rendering engine behind some of the web’s most demanding real-time graphics. It is also promising a huge reveal at this year’s ICE in Barcelona.