OpenAI acquired Ona, formerly Gitpod, to give its coding product persistent agents running in the cloud. The tool had already reached 5 million weekly users.
Persistent, in this context, means work continues between sessions: the agent doesn't restart from zero when someone closes the window. That shifts the usage pattern from conversation to delegation, the same direction other tools in the category took over the period.
The acquired company brought exactly the infrastructure piece required: a cloud development environment where code actually runs, with dependencies installed, rather than a model suggesting text.
The weekly user figure explains the urgency. At that scale, the difference between a tool that suggests and one that executes becomes a product difference, and whoever arrives first defines what the market expects as standard.
The operational caution is the usual one for background work: an agent acting while nobody watches needs audit logging and a bounded reach inside the repository, or code review loses track of what it's reviewing.