# “Unblocked is the institutional memory you were never given access to.” URL: https://getunblocked.com/customers/cloudbeds/ Customer: Cloudbeds Published: 2026-08-31T12:00:00.000Z Metrics: 987 GitHub repositories indexed, 66% less tokens per agent task, 3 teams engineering, infra, and product on one context engine Cloudbeds uses Unblocked as the context engine across engineering, infrastructure, and product, giving people and AI agents the institutional knowledge behind nearly a thousand repositories at a third of the tokens. --- Cloudbeds powers hospitality businesses around the world with one platform for reservations, guest experience, and everything in between. Behind it sits a fully remote team, nearly a thousand GitHub repositories, seventy-some microservices, and more than a decade of technical decisions. The problem is familiar to most companies: the knowledge that explains the system is scattered across Slack threads, Jira tickets, wiki pages, and the memories of people who may have already left. What makes Cloudbeds worth studying is how they solved it. Not one team, but three. An engineering manager who wired Unblocked into every AI skill their org runs. A DevOps leader responsible for infrastructure nobody fully remembers building. And a product manager who rarely reads the code at all. Each of them landed on the same answer: Unblocked as the context engine, one MCP that gives people and agents the decision-grade context behind the code. ## The challenge: a company's memory, scattered across a thousand repositories Emmanuel “Emo” Rodriguez leads DevOps at Cloudbeds, part of the infra group that owns every service the company runs. When he counted, he found 987 GitHub repositories wrapping roughly seventy microservices, each split across source, GitOps, and Terraform repos. Finding which repository owns a resource meant hoping the naming conventions held. "The 80 percent will respect the guidelines," he says, "but the 20 percent will just do wild things. It's painful." The deeper problem was time. "The company has existed for more than fifteen years. I've been here three," Emo says. "We're missing years of technical decisions that we're still responsible for. It's not because we haven't touched those things that we don't own them. We own the whole infrastructure." Charles Thompson, an engineering manager on the Reservation and Guest team, knew the same feeling from the code side. "How do you find that before Unblocked? You grep through commits and hope people wrote good commit messages. Or you search Jira and hope it was in your project, and that you're looking for the right words." For Chris Hovanessian, a group product manager overseeing guest experience, the cost showed up in every ticket. "Creating a genuinely good ticket was archaeology," he says. "I'd search Slack, ask in channels, sometimes wait a day or more for a reply, and hope the one engineer who remembered the history wasn't out of office or gone from the company." ## The solution: context in every channel and at the front of every skill Cloudbeds put Unblocked everywhere questions happen. In Slack, it sits in every channel and jumps in on its own when it has a confident answer. "I can't oversell it," Charles says. "If your team lives in Slack, put it into every channel. If you think you don't need it in that channel, you're wrong." > “Somebody's asking about something, and I'll say, I think we've talked about this before. Unblocked reads the thread and comes back: yeah, you did. Here are the fifteen places you discussed this, this is the last thing you said, and this is probably what you were going to do next. Perfect. Thank you. And we move on.” > Charles Thompson, Engineering Manager, Cloudbeds Over in the infra channel, the same thing happens without anyone asking. "Sometimes people ask a question and Unblocked just jumps in and answers for them," Emo says. > “We completely forget that it's there. It works in the shadows, but it does its job.” > Emo Rodriguez, Director of DevOps, Cloudbeds _[Video: 01 - Answers In Every Channel]_ Then Charles went further and made Unblocked the first step every agent takes. After testing it against a real incident investigation, he opened roughly twenty pull requests so every AI skill the team runs starts by asking Unblocked. "Most AI agents are excellent doers. They'll build anything you want," he says. "What Unblocked is great at is telling me how we got here. If I can give my doer agents the why, they do a better job of whatever comes next. Otherwise your agent goes down a deep hole, and halfway through a senior engineer looks at it and says, that will never work, because of these four other repos you don't know about. Unblocked knows about them." ## The proof: the same answer consumes 66% fewer tokens Before rolling Unblocked into every workflow, Charles ran an experiment. He took a recent incident and triaged it twice with an existing Claude skill: once as-is, and once with a single added instruction, step one, talk to Unblocked. > “Unblocked used about a third of the tokens. Five thousand versus fifteen thousand. And the thing I thought was amazing is that Unblocked had the answer already. The rest was just my AI dressing it up. After that I opened up about twenty PRs, and now the first thing all of our skills do is ask Unblocked.” > Charles Thompson, Engineering Manager, Cloudbeds _[Video: 02 - A Third of the Tokens]_ The archaeology got faster too. Charles once needed to know why a background sync component had been removed; all he had was a vague memory that it changed. "With Unblocked I said, I'm pretty sure this thing used to sync itself, and at some point we decided that was a bad idea. When, and why? It came back with five tickets, the Slack conversation, and a Confluence page one of my own team members had written about the transition," he says. "I gave that to our new hire. Instead of a day of digging, or just saying trust me, that's how it happened, I could give them the rationale. Why we changed something is how you make the better next decision." On the product side, Unblocked started connecting dots no human could see. "Five different bug tickets filed over several months were actually one regression with the same root cause," Hova says. "No one had connected them, because the evidence was split across Jira, Slack, and GitHub, and no one person could see all three at once." > “The most expensive thing a product team does is relitigate decisions that were already made. The what saves you minutes or hours. The why saves you sprints.” > Chris Hovanessian, Group Product Manager, Cloudbeds _[Video: 03 - The Why Not Just the What]_ ## The results: answers you can trust, tickets that don't suck Ask any of the three what stands out and they land on the same word: trust. "The thing I really like about Unblocked is that whenever it speaks up, it's always right," Charles says. "I can't think of a time it told me something that wasn't correct. It has the Slack conversations, the Zendesk tickets, the Jira comments, all that history, and it applies it to whether this really solves the root of what we're trying to accomplish. You could build another AI to do that. It would take four times as long and cost ten times as much." Emo sees the same quality in pull request reviews, where an in-house reviewer kept running out of tokens and another tool buried the team in noise. "Unblocked is always providing feedback, and when it does, it's relevant. It's not intrusive. It's a helpful companion," he says. It even picked up the team's shared Claude rules from a central repository on its own and started enforcing them in review. For Hova, the change reversed the flow of information between product and engineering. > “Product used to be a net consumer of engineering's time. Every spec, every ticket, every planning session involved me pulling context out of someone's head. Now I arrive with the context already gathered, and engineering gets tickets that let them hit the ground running. It's less can someone explain this to me, and more here's what I found, does it match your understanding?” > Chris Hovanessian, Group Product Manager, Cloudbeds _[Video: 04 - Context Flows to Engineering]_ Their squad's sprint planning now runs repo inference unattended: every ticket entering a sprint gets the relevant repositories, linked history, and root cause candidates attached before an engineer ever touches it. "Unblocked makes my Jira tickets not suck," Hova says. "Ticket quality has gone up and the cost has gone down at the same time, which is something you almost never see." ## Not just for engineers Everyone assumes a context engine is for the people who write the code. Cloudbeds found the entire company benefits. > “Engineers could always read the code. I never could. Unblocked levels that playing field. It gives product people first class access to how and why the system works, without an active translator. And because it's an MCP, it plugs into whatever tooling you already use.” > Chris Hovanessian, Group Product Manager, Cloudbeds _[Video: 05 - First-Class Access for Non-Engineers]_ New engineers get the same effect. "What I tell all of our new hires now is, first thing, talk to Unblocked," Charles says. "Ask in a public channel, because people will jump in to fill in that last ten percent. If you're already ninety percent there, people are quick to help. That protects your seniors' time, and people are just so much faster now. No one gets excited about doing archaeology on Confluence. They get excited about solving the problem." The habit has become a verb. During the trial, one of Charles's engineers posted a question in a channel, then edited it seconds later: wait, I'm just going to ask Unblocked. "He unblocked himself," Charles laughs. "You know you're doing good when you're like Google. Just unblocked it." ## The bottom line for engineering leaders Cloudbeds knows exactly what life without Unblocked looks like, because they lived it. After an early trial ended, the team went about a year without it. "Everything took longer," Charles says. "And the more we integrated with other AI tools, the worse it got. Waiting ten minutes for an agent to come back wrong is infuriating. It was like working in the dark. There are two tools I can't imagine working without, and after twenty years as an engineer you'd think an IDE would be one of them. It's not. It's Unblocked and my AI tool." > “Your code tells you what's happening today. It doesn't tell you why. And to make good decisions, why is what matters. That's what Unblocked gives you.” > Charles Thompson, Engineering Manager, Cloudbeds _[Video: 06 - Code Tells You What Not Why]_ Get in touch with us today to see how Unblocked can be the context engine for your engineering organization.