Retrofit or reimagine? Developer environments for humans and agents | Ona’s Matt Boyle

**Andrew** (0:05)
Today, we're talking to Matt Boyle, the head of Product Design and Engineering for Ona, a company you may formerly know as Gitpod. And today, we're talking about how agentic AI is only as good as its workspace, and how Ona is taking that workspace to the enterprise as an entire platform, and what that entails. Because cloud environments, they're built for human devs. We talk about this a lot on Dev Interrupted, how agents and agentic engineering is arriving into an Internet not built for it yet. But these agentic environments, they need to be ephemeral, secure, and pre-configured. And all of that becomes the new stakes for building a platform for AI engineering. So today, we're diving in with Matt about how you scope that, how you design it, and what the implications are of having that kind of safe, disposable, and configurable work environment for your AI at scale.
How do you share the distribution of the gains of your 10x and 100x agentically enabled engineers to everybody else? I think that's the challenge at hand. And what's most interesting to reflect on, and a joke that I loved from when I first talked with Matt, is the idea of trying to create an agent jail. The idea of creating a place that contains it so well. So how do you take that solo agent jail experience to the enterprise? That's what we're going to figure out today. So Matt, welcome to Dev Interrupted.

**Matt Boyle** (1:30)
Thank you. I love that intro. One thing that really resonated that you said to me, Dan, I've never really thought about it in that specific terms yet, is agents have arrived into an internet that's not ready for them. And so I think we're, for the very first time in a long time, we're building, something's already happened, and we're building behind it a little bit, right? To try and get all the things and assumptions we made in the past up to the place we need them to be. So I really like that framing.

**Andrew** (1:55)
Oh, great. I'm excited to dive into more of it and kind of see what you think about some of the other ideas we've been talking about on the show too, because y'all have a big mission ahead. The idea of an agentic platform, a place where you can run agents off of your laptop in scalable, auditable, configurable and secure ways, that's like the real next big challenge, I think, for enterprises and especially larger companies that are trying to integrate it into their preexisting tech. The brownfield problem in AI right now is really big.
So I want to just know a little bit more, Matt, about the pivot from being in a world where you have these ephemeral workspace environments at Gitpod and seeing this opportunity and like you said, that was built for an internet that agents didn't exist in. So what were the first steps you all thought of like, how can we re-envision this for this new world we're all stepping into?

**Matt Boyle** (2:47)
Yeah. I actually really, I like the word re-envision versus a pivot. Because the really interesting thing about what we're doing with Ona is we are building on top of Gitpod. Like we haven't kind of changed the product fundamentally. We're actually just taking it further than it was before. And the way I think about this is and why we kind of felt the need to rebrand and kind of come out with Ona. Because if you think about Gitpod's mission to start with was to make it so you're always ready to code. And like that mission is still kind of showing up in the way we're building. But the ultimate goal was to make humans more productive by creating environments where you hit play and the tests run and the codes are always ready. Really focused on getting people to have a really fast time to first commit. And in large organizations where you have real diversity in languages, code bases, make it incredibly easy to be productive. Some of our larger customers, before joining, before adopting Ona, their time to first commit might be somewhere in the 30 to 40 days, just because of all the bureaucracy they got to get through setting up their laptop. And we can distill that down to hitting a button, which is create environment, and everything else happens. You get to use the, get the best engineer in the company to set up their laptop in the cloud, then everyone gets to benefit from it.

**Andrew** (3:59)
And I love that zoom in on the idea there, that you said of time to first commit, because it's like a developer experience metric of trying to make it easy for them. So again, the idea of it being designed for the humans using the internet, right?