Ona's Software Factory Experiment and Auto-Approving Low-Risk PRs
Published on 18.04.2026
Software Factory: Ten Days of Agents Shipping a Real Product
TLDR: Ona started a public experiment called Software Factory where a small army of background agents builds Memo, a Notion-style note app, with zero human-written code. By day three the agents had already closed 50 PRs and shipped auth, workspaces, a Lexical editor, and full-text search. The site captures each day's milestone, and day four opened the automations dashboard to show the 14 chained agents doing the work.
Auto-Approving Low-Risk PRs Cut Lead Time by 74%
TLDR: Ona's internal team was producing PRs faster than humans could review them, with a median 2 hour 49 minute wait for first approval. They wrote a Low-Risk Change Policy, let an AI agent auto-approve PRs that meet six objective criteria, and watched time to first approval drop to 3.8 minutes, lead time drop 74%, and weekly deploys triple.
How auto-approving low-risk PRs with AI cut our lead time by 74%
Redesigning Ona Conversations as a Shared Workspace
TLDR: Ona rebuilt the core conversation UI so the agent and the developer feel like they are looking at the same screen. The old layout had a chat on the left fighting a utility panel on the right that tried to do environments, diffs, and an editor at once. The new layout anchors output next to dialogue, moves runtime into a bottom drawer, and pulls PR review inline.
Designing for Collaboration: How we rethought Ona conversations
Ona Changelog: Inline Review, Org Skills, Automations, and Claude Opus 4.6
TLDR: A dense changelog covering inline code review inside Ona sessions, organization-level Agent Skills, a full Automations system with templates and guardrails, SCIM provisioning for Entra ID, new MCP integrations for Atlassian, Notion, and Sentry, and an upgrade to Claude Opus 4.6 at the same price as 4.5.
Background Agents Virtual Summit: Call for Speakers
TLDR: Ona is running the first virtual summit focused on background agents and opened a call for speakers. The event brings together engineers, leaders, and vendors building autonomous software development. Details are light, registration is open.