Gitpod, known for offering browser-based cloud development environments, has rebranded as Ona, signaling a major shift in its vision from IDE-centric workflows to AI-driven software engineering. The company now positions itself as "mission control for your personal team of software engineering agents", offering tools that span planning, coding, reviewing, and deployment, powered by autonomous agents and secure infrastructure.
Ona’s platform introduces high-autonomy agents that operate in fully sandboxed environments, each with OS-level isolation to avoid cross-environment interference. These Ona Agents outperform previous solutions based on their own experience. Inside its own engineering teams, they co-authored 60% of merged pull requests and contributed 72% of merged code last week. Meanwhile, according to the company, customers report a 4x increase in development throughput. The company has even extended usability across devices. Ona works via browser-based VS Code, on smartphones, or in desktop IDEs, making development seamless across contexts.
Ona offers an ecosystem comprised of three core components: (1) Ona Environments, which are API-first, sandboxed developer environments preconfigured with dependencies and integrations and defined via devcontainer.json and automations.yml; (2) Ona Agents, AI-powered collaborators supporting multiple workflows and device types, with slash commands to automate common engineering tasks; and (3) Ona Guardrails, offering enterprise-grade security including audit trails, RBAC, SSO/OIDC, command-level controls, and deployment in user-defined VPCs.
In contrast to Ona, competitors such as GitHub Copilot are positioned as an AI-powered coding assistant, an inline pair programmer integrated into your IDE, assisting with suggestions and completions. It doesn't provide sandboxed execution environments, autonomous agents, or platform-wide orchestration.GitHub Codespaces offers container-based development environments, making developer setup easy by provisioning prebuilt workspaces in the cloud. However, it lacks the AI-native autonomy and agent orchestration that define Ona's platform.
In Gitpod's prior model, it already provided secure, ephemeral cloud IDEs with integrations and compliance. But as Ona, it has evolved into a platform where AI agents take on the bulk of engineering tasks autonomously, while maintaining VPC security, auditability, and full integration with enterprise tooling. This positions Ona distinctly apart from developer tools like Copilot or Codespaces, which prioritize individual productivity within an IDE rather than team-wide agent-driven workflows.
While most of the news around this news has been positive, on one Hacker News post, the announcement sparked both curiosity and critique. One user joked: "From the headline, I could guess it was going to be an AI play with a VS Code fork." Another commenter noted that Ona positions itself "as an agent layer on top of their CDE product", rather than a standalone IDE replacement. A more skeptical voice lamented, "RIP to Gitpod, once a great Remote Development Environment, now a generic AI agent", questioning why this launch wasn't delivered as a separate product.
More information on Ona’s products can be found on the company's website.>