September 2025 Summaries

Gitpod Classic is set to be phased out by October 15, 2025, prompting users to migrate to the new Ona platform, which offers enhanced performance, cost savings, and modernized features. While Gitpod Enterprise customers are exempt from this deadline, other users are encouraged to switch to Ona, which provides faster environments with up to 32 cores and 128GB RAM, improved VM isolation, and substantial cost reductions. The migration involves transitioning from .gitpod.yml to devcontainer.json and automations.yml, with automated tools available to facilitate this process. Ona maintains the core one-click environment setup and integrations with GitHub and GitLab, while Bitbucket support is forthcoming. Notably, Ona introduces Ona Agents, which assist with coding tasks, potentially increasing productivity, though their use is optional and incurs no cost unless engaged. The platform's architecture is designed for reliability and speed, with regional cloud operations to optimize user experience. Users must manually migrate their accounts, project settings, and environment variables, and can benefit from a $100 credit offer during the transition. Various pricing tiers are available, including a free tier and a Core tier, which is the recommended option for most users transitioning from Gitpod Classic.

In the context of engineering, incidents are often seen as negative events requiring urgent fixes, but they can also serve as powerful tools for focus and communication. This concept was tested during the launch of Ona, a rebranding from Gitpod, where the event was treated as an incident to ensure stability, correctness, and centralized communication. By declaring the launch an incident, the team utilized a structured process with clear roles, proactive alerting, and a single communication thread, allowing for efficient management of the event and any minor issues that arose. This approach reframed the narrative of incidents as negative occurrences, suggesting that incident management tools can be effectively applied to high-stakes situations to achieve clarity, focus, and ownership. The experience demonstrated that using incident frameworks for launches or significant projects can enhance coordination and outcomes, providing a new perspective on incident management as a proactive strategy.

Ona is a software system designed to enhance productivity by facilitating parallel work and minimizing cognitive load in AI-assisted environments. It challenges traditional software engineering practices, which emphasize singular focus, by encouraging multitasking through a redesigned interface that reduces the cost of context switching and enables users to monitor and manage multiple tasks simultaneously. Features such as a persistent sidebar provide real-time updates on task progress, while an integrated conversation view offers detailed insights into current and past agent activities. Ona's design, influenced by the principle that plans are resources for situated action, focuses on flexibility and collaboration rather than rigid execution, allowing users to adapt workflows dynamically via tools like TODOs and slash commands. Additionally, the system prioritizes user control and minimizes risk through mechanisms like isolated environments, an emergency stop button, and frequent commits, ensuring a balance between innovation and security. Ultimately, Ona aims to amplify the user's ability to work efficiently with AI by offering a streamlined, intuitive interface that supports parallel workstreams without overwhelming the user.

Ona, formerly known as Gitpod, is redefining software development by introducing software engineering agents as the new standard, moving beyond traditional IDEs. These agents operate in high-autonomy, sandboxed environments with full OS-level isolation, enabling secure and efficient collaboration without cross-environment conflicts. The platform provides a unified interface for managing the entire software development lifecycle, from scoping issues to coding and reviewing, and allows seamless transitions across devices. Ona's architecture includes API-first cloud development environments, customizable Ona Agents, and robust security features with Ona Guardrails, offering full control over source code and infrastructure. With recent advancements, Ona has demonstrated significant increases in productivity and throughput, as evidenced by their internal metrics and customer feedback. The transition from Gitpod to Ona reflects a broader ambition to serve large-scale enterprises, as evidenced by their growing client base and substantial contracts, marking an exciting new phase in cloud-based software development.

Over ten weeks, Ona has significantly increased the team's productivity, more than doubling their throughput in terms of pull requests merged per week. Designed as mission control for software engineering agents, Ona enhances productivity, convenience, parallelism, and security for software engineers by utilizing Ona Agents and Environments to provide robust security, isolation, and human-agent interaction. This document serves as a best practice guide for using Ona, highlighting that Ona has contributed to 75% of the code changes within the team. The guide encourages experimentation to find personalized solutions and is a culmination of collaborative efforts, experiences, and insights shared by engineers, design partners, users, and customers. Special thanks are extended to Matthew Boyle for his contributions to the post.

Gitpod Classic users are reminded that the service will sunset on October 15th as Gitpod transitions to Ona, a more advanced platform for software engineering. Users can still enjoy features like reproducible development environments and hosted compute offerings, but the platform now introduces enhanced infrastructure, AI agents, and security measures with Ona Environments, Ona Agents, and Ona Guardrails. The main change for users is the shift from the .gitpod.yml configuration format to the more flexible and industry-standard devcontainer.json and automations.yml formats. Users are encouraged to migrate their data manually and utilize the migration command provided by Ona. Ona will offer three pricing tiers—Free, Core, and Enterprise—with significant cost savings on environments compared to Gitpod Classic. Users must complete their migration by October 15th to avoid disruptions, and new login credentials will be required at app.ona.com.