Ona Automations: proactive background agents
Code that writes, ships, and improves recursively.
Software engineering as we know it is racing towards its endgame.
Over the last 80 days, Ona authored 89% of the PRs we merged on main. Stripe's Minions merge over a thousand agent-authored pull requests per week. Ramp's background agents account for 57% of all merged PRs.
Today, we're making Ona Automations generally available to everyone.
Automations are proactive background agents running in the cloud that combine AI prompts with deterministic shell scripts in trigger-based, closed-loop workflows.
What teams are doing with Automations
Below are five examples from how we and our customers are using Automations.
Autonomous backlog picker
Runs daily at 8am. Ona scans the Linear backlog for well-scoped tickets, picks one up, writes the code, runs CI, and opens a PR. CI is green when you see it. Work that would sit at the bottom of the backlog for months gets done autonomously.
"The first thing I do when I start my day is merge a PR on my phone."
Sentry issue triage and fix
Runs daily at 9:30am. Uses Ona's Sentry integration. Ona triages new issues, fixes them, and opens PRs. Reduces noise in Sentry and potentially your Sentry bill. Engineers start their day with bugs already fixed instead of a triage queue.
The underlying skill is reusable: the same skill runs inside Ona environments for interactive use and as an automation in the background.
Codebase cleanup with Knip
Combines a deterministic shell script (Knip) with the agent. Finds unused JS and TS dependencies, exports, and files. Creates small, reviewable PRs with automerge enabled. Keeps the codebase clean and context windows tight for other agents.
This is the kind of work that never gets prioritized on a roadmap. Think about the tasks that don't get done in your organization. Automations can do them for you.
CVE remediation with Snyk or Aikido
Runs CLIs from Snyk or Aikido against targeted projects. Ona resolves all found CVEs, reruns the scan until clean, and creates standardized PRs. Schedule it for Sunday at 8pm and review clean PRs Monday morning.
Every execution gets the exact same tooling. The environment is reproducible. It always works.
Migrations at scale
Engineering organizations spend up to 30% of their time on CVE mitigations, dependency updates, and large-scale migrations. These are the projects that get planned every quarter and slip every quarter: individually simple, collectively expensive. Automations handles them in the background.
Migrate CI pipelines from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions. Upgrade Java 8 to 17. Modernize legacy systems like COBOL. Convert JavaScript to TypeScript incrementally. Batch repos on a schedule, 10 every Sunday night, creating incremental, reviewable PRs that engineers review Monday morning.
"90–95% of work is done by Ona Automations. We just have to do the final push commands."
— Top-5 pharma company
How it works
You can schedule Ona to proactively pick up work, run it, verify it, and deliver merge-ready pull requests. All of this happens while your team sleeps, commutes, or focuses on the problems that actually need a human.
Every Automation you set up:
- defines when Ona runs (manually, on a schedule, on pull requests, or via webhooks)
- what it operates on (configured projects, single repositories, a group, or a fuzzy match across your GitHub or GitLab org)
- what work to do using custom sequences of prompts and deterministic shell scripts with your own CLI tools like Aikido, Knip, or OpenRewrite.
Ona clones, branches, installs, builds, tests, iterates, commits, pushes, and opens a PR following the same loop a human engineer runs, except it can do it across hundreds of repos in parallel and in the background.
Every Automation runs in a fully configured and secure environment defined by devcontainer.json and automations.yaml. Dependencies install, services start, tools are available. This is what gives Ona the full run loop. Not a stripped-down CI container, but a full development environment with access to everything a human developer has access to.
When it's done, you get a full report: throughput, failures, linked PRs, and a complete audit trail you can use for compliance, security audits, or AI readiness assessments across your codebase.
Integrations
Ona has native integrations with Linear, Sentry, Notion, GitHub, GitLab and Atlassian giving it the same context and permissions your engineers have to read your backlog, triage issues and open PRs.
Additionally, any MCP server can be added as config-in-code via .ona/mcp-config.json in your repository. Granola, Context7, Playwright, Firecrawl, your internal tools.
Runs in the cloud
Ona runs in the background in the cloud. Your laptop doesn't need to be on and you can work from your phone or iPad.
On Ona Cloud, execution happens in Ona's infrastructure. Enterprise customers can also run Ona in their own network (AWS, GCP), which means Ona can query your databases, hit your internal APIs, and run your full test suite against staging without tunnels or exported secrets. The same connectivity and context your engineers have when they're on the network.
Editor handoff
At any point, an engineer can take over and interact with the exact environment Ona Automations used. Same state, same tools, same context. Review the work in VS Code in the browser, connect with your own IDE, or take over entirely. There's no gap between what Ona did and what you see. No re-setup, no drift, no "it worked in CI but I can't reproduce it." You're in the same place Ona was.
Templates
You can start from pre-built templates (CVE remediation, backlog picker, codebase cleanup) or build your own from scratch.
Getting started
Automations are available today in our Core and Enterprise plans.
Read the Automations documentation for setup guides and examples.