Newsletter · Ona

ona	Ona Newsletter April 2026

We're running a two-week experiment on building a software factory live. From an empty repo, Ona agents are building Memo, a Notion-style notes app, with zero human-written code. Humans steer intent. Agents handle planning, implementation, testing, and deployment.

Three days later, we had 50 PRs, a live product, and a few answers we didn't expect. More on that below.

TL;DR

•	Software factory, live over two weeks: zero code by humans, minimum intervention. Agents are building a production app from scratch.
•	Background Agents Virtual Summit, May 6: free registration and CFP is live. We want to hear how your team is actually using background agents in production.
•	Matt on Dev Interrupted: what "giving agents root access" actually means when your compliance team is watching.
•	New Ona interface: two-panel layout with inline code review, persistent conversation history, and a redesigned workspace.
•	April changelog: warm pools GA, GCP runners on Ona Cloud, CLI via Homebrew, Granola integration.

Building a software factory, live, over two weeks

Memo is a Notion-style notes app being built from an empty repo by Ona agents. We're streaming the process of building out a software factory, with zero code written by humans and minimal human intervention daily. See where agents get stuck and where they don't, and learn how to replicate this yourself. The project is public, including all automations and skills used.

We're streaming daily through April 25.

Follow along at software-factory.dev

Background Agents Virtual Summit, May 6

We're looking for talks from teams that have put background agents into production. Scaled migrations, built governance from scratch, or found failure modes nobody warned them about. If that's you, submit it here.

Not speaking? Register to attend to learn what's working (and what isn't) when agents handle real workloads.

Reserve your spot

Auto-approving low-risk PRs: from 2h 49min to 3.8 minutes

Our engineers were producing PRs faster than they could review them. The review queue, not the coding, was the bottleneck. Our fix: an Ona automation evaluates every PR against six objective criteria (line count, no protobuf changes, no migrations, no infra, no auth, no audit logging). If all six pass, the agent approves the review. A human still merges manually.

Four weeks in, median time to first approval dropped from 2 hours 49 minutes to 3.8 minutes. Lead time fell 74%, and deploys tripled.

Read the full breakdown

Matt on Dev Interrupted: agent jails and the death of the IDE

What enterprise environments need when agents have root access. Matt covers Project Veto's kernel-level security, why the IDE is fading as the primary interface, and the question nobody in compliance wants to answer yet: what happens when the agent, not the developer, is the one making changes to production systems?

Listen on Spotify

A new way to work with Ona

We redesigned the Ona interface around a two-panel layout: the agent's conversation anchored alongside code changes, with inline diff comments that feed back into the conversation directly. Conversation history now persists across environment stops, so you don't lose context when you pick up the next morning.

Ports, services, and tasks moved into a bottom drawer so they're accessible without competing for visual priority. And you can browse changes and conversation history even when no environment is running.

Read the full design story

What else shipped in April

•	Warm pools GA: environment startup in ~10 seconds, down from minutes.
•	Self-serve GCP runners on Ona Cloud: three-step Terraform wizard. No more AWS-only. Available for Enterprise plan users.
•	CLI via Homebrew: `brew install ona`
•	Granola integration: agents pull meeting notes and transcripts into context.

Full changelog

Events

Software Factory livestream — daily through April 25
A self-driving codebase that ships continuously - built in the open, entirely by AI agents.

Background Agents Virtual Summit — May 6
Register to attend · Submit a talk

AWS Summit London — April 22
Booth S5. Demos of background agents and the new Ona interface.

Reuters Momentum AI, New York — April 28–29
Our CTO Chris joins a panel on enterprise agentic AI alongside leaders from Southern Company and Novartis.

AWS Summit New York City — June 17
Free one-day event. More details closer to the date.

May your factories run unattended and your specs never drift,

Lou
Field CTO, Ona

the factory floor is live