Meet Compass: Wealthsimple’s AI Teammate

The idea for Compass was simple: what if you could assign a Jira ticket directly to an LLM, and have it write the code and open a pull request automatically? The ticket description itself would be the prompt, and AI would use it to implement the change and update the test suite. After a week of intense coding during Wealthsimple’s 2025 Innovation Days, our internal hackathon, the first Compass prototype was up and running.

True to our value of Ship it, what started out as a solo project soon became a collaborative effort as teams across the company incorporated the tool into their daily workflows.

Today, Compass is an AI teammate and it lives in Slack. Mention it in any channel and it will write code, answer a question about our data, build you a working microsite, or find what you need across Notion, Google, and Slack. Since June it has reviewed 38,500+ pull requests and opened 6,800+ pull requests across 100+ repositories, spanning a wide range of technology stacks.

Shaped by the People Using It

Bit by bit, Compass grew from feedback. Wealthsimplers tried it, hit edge cases, and posted about them in Slack. Within days, an improvement was shipped.

We taught Compass to read and review pull request comments, then respond directly, updating the code, pushing a commit, and replying in-thread. The feedback loop between reviewer and AI became a conversation instead of a handoff.

We gave Compass a full development environment to let it run tests, read CI failures, and correct its own work.

If it could write pull requests, it could read them too. We also added an AI code review agent that scans eligible pull requests in participating private repositories for bugs, security issues, and style drift, the things humans catch on a good day, but might miss on a busy Friday afternoon.

Early on, Compass worked in just a handful of repositories. But engineers kept asking the same question: “When will this work in my repo?”

So we tested, refined, and expanded its reach. Within months, Compass had grown to a company-wide tool, working across 100+ repositories and every major tech stack we use.

Meeting People Where They Work

Slack is where a lot of work happens. So we brought Compass into Slack as an assistant you can mention in any channel it has access to. Ask it a question, give it a task, or tag it into a thread. This made Compass feel less like a tool and more like a teammate you can pull into conversations.

A secure Model Context Protocol service gave Compass access to approved tools across code, tickets, observability, and documentation. That meant people could stop copy-pasting context between systems and let Compass do the connecting. It also reads bounded context from the current Slack thread and selected linked threads, following the discussion, decisions, and goal, not just responding to the latest message.

Bringing Compass to All Wealthsimplers

It isn’t just engineers using it. Teams across Marketing, Client Experience, Communications, and Data have built reusable Compass skills for everyday work, from answering ad-hoc data questions and investigating promo details to helping advisors find answers to product and policy questions, and even updating web copy. One team built an automated backlog workflow that scans a team’s ticket backlog, picks up well-specified tickets, makes a plan, and delegates the implementation to Compass. Compass then opens the pull requests autonomously. Engineers can start the day with draft pull requests ready for review, including tickets that might otherwise sit untouched.

The people closest to the work can shape how Compass supports it, turning Compass from a single internal tool into a platform for building agents that match how Wealthsimple actually works.

Ask It Anything

Writing and reviewing code turned out to be half of it. Because Compass can reach our data warehouse through that same secure connection, you can ask it a question in plain English and get an answer back with the query it ran, so you can check its work.

What We Learned

Building Compass taught us something we didn’t expect: the most powerful thing about an AI tool isn't what it does in isolation. It's what happens when everyone can see each other using it.

Our internal Slack channel, called #building-in-public, is a live conversation that everyone at the company can view, learn from, and participate in. Someone asks Compass to debug a failing service, and a teammate from a different team jumps in with context that helps Compass identify the right approach.

The part that still surprises us is how Compass improves Compass. Engineers assign it tickets on its own codebase. It writes the feature, opens the PR, and a human reviews it. The tool that builds the product also builds itself, and every improvement makes the next one faster.

This is what an AI-first company actually looks like: AI isn’t bolted on, but woven into how the work gets done.

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Interested in working at Wealthsimple? Check out the open roles on our team today.