September 2026 Summaries

Astronomer has expanded Otto, its AI agent for Airflow and Astro, from the Astro IDE to a context-aware panel available throughout Astro’s browser interface, enabling users to ask deployment and DAG questions, troubleshoot failures, and approve actions without repeatedly providing context. The company has also introduced a hosted, authenticated MCP server that lets MCP-compatible agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Claude Desktop, and VS Code connect to Astro using existing credentials and permissions, providing access to Astro control-plane resources and Otto’s capabilities. For Enterprise Business Critical customers, Astronomer is offering limited early access to Bring-Your-Own-Model support for approved OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoints, while recommending Otto’s managed models for most teams due to automatic updates and cost optimization. Upcoming developments include a Carnegie Mellon partnership on agent benchmarking and extensions for VS Code and Cursor that will integrate deployment browsing, DAG controls, logs, and Otto.