Ona reposted this
Background agents humming across a software assembly line can't run on a laptop. What's blocking your team is what has been broken all along: your development environment. Alistair Gray wrote about Stripe's Minions wo merge over a thousand background agent-authored pull requests per week. Rahul Sengottuvelu and Zach Bruggeman wrote about Ramp's background agent accounting for 57% of all merged PRs. Last week, Ona authored 88.5% of the PRs we merged on main. Stripe had cloud-based devboxes before GPT-3 existed. When they built their coding agent, they didn't need to figure out where it runs. The answer already existed — the same environment every engineer uses. Same dependencies, same test suite, same credentials. The agent infrastructure was a thin layer on top of years of environment investment. The inverse is what we see at most companies. Teams wire agents to issue trackers, auto-assign tickets, generate code. The agent can read the codebase, maybe compile it. But it can't run the app, execute tests against real services, or validate its own work. It produces code that looks right but hasn't been tested. The gap between "generates a diff" and "opens a merge-ready PR" is the development environment. We started Gitpod (now Ona) five years ago because we believed dev would move to the cloud. "The year of the cloud development environment" became the new "year of the Linux desktop", always right in theory, never in practice. AI changed that. Fleets of agents running in parallel don't fit on a laptop. Each needs its own isolated, fully provisioned environment with access to internal services and production-grade toolchains. You can't buy a MacBook big enough to run five full monorepo environments simultaneously. Development is finally moving to the cloud, through a different door than we expected. I wrote about what we learned building this infrastructure for five years, what we got wrong, and what it takes to actually run background agents at scale. As part of that I'm excited to announce that Leonardo Di Donato and Lorenzo Fontana, the creators of Falco, join Ona to build the most reliable and trusted background agent in the world.