How loveholidays is making everyone a builder with Codex

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The online travel company is using Codex to put software development in the hands of teams across the business—while helping engineers focus on harder problems.

loveholidays⁠ is a leading online travel agent operating across eight European markets, using its technology to process 60 trillion package combinations every day to help millions of people find their perfect holiday. Behind that scale is a technology platform the company has spent years building to make finding and booking a holiday faster and more flexible.

Product managers, designers, and commercial teams are increasingly contributing directly to loveholidays’ codebases. Teams can prototype customer experiences, make data and infrastructure changes, and turn ideas into working software without every request first having to enter an engineering queue.

“Everybody is a builder,” says Dmitri Lerko, Head of Engineering at loveholidays. “Making changes to our applications, infrastructure, and deploying code is no longer an engineering-only activity. Product managers, designers, and commercial stakeholders are driving value and making deployments.”

For Mike Jones, CTO at loveholidays, that’s part of a bigger ambition: building what the company calls the general intelligence for travel by combining its technology with the expertise of its people—and making both more accessible through AI.

Previously, someone elsewhere in the business with an idea for a new customer experience would need to persuade an engineering team to prioritise a prototype. Every experiment therefore came with an opportunity cost: engineering time spent testing one idea was engineering time unavailable elsewhere.

Its engineers created Search Playground using the company’s design system, frontend technologies, and Codex. It gives people across the business a way to turn an idea into a working customer experience, gather feedback, and test whether it delivers value.

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