The enterprise version of Codex just dropped (but it's not from OpenAI)
Saturday morning hacking on your side-project these days with Codex just looks different. You now spin up three agents to tackle different parts of your app and then hit the gym getting pinged with update notifications between deadlift sets. You’re not just coding anymore, you’re orchestrating a symphony of AI working in the background.
But then Monday morning hits hard when you’re back in the stone age, typing characters like some kind of artisan. Why should your weekend projects have better developer experience than your day job? Why can’t you ‘vibe code’ during the week, too?
The answer is simple—until now, you just haven’t had the right tool for the job.
Your favorite weekend tools, ready for the weekday
Everything you love about Codex from the parallel execution, to the background processing and the feeling of being a conductor is exactly what you get with Ona.
What is Ona? Ona is Gitpod’s privacy-first software engineering agent that runs autonomously in secure, isolated development environments within your own VPC. Unlike traditional AI coding tools, Ona can execute long-running tasks in the background—refactoring, testing, debugging—while you focus on higher-level work.
Caption: Pairing with Ona using the VS Code editor option directly inside of Gitpod
The key difference? The environments run inside your company’s private network. Ona gives you an interface that allows you to delegate as many software tasks as you want to run in the background and in parallel. Except with Ona it comes with all of the bells and whistles needed to run at work (like SSO, audit trails) and not just on the weekends.
Agents that won’t get you fired by your CISO
But how does it work? A runner is installed in your network. You plug in your VPC and subnet information and choose a model, typically from Amazon Bedrock. Finally you hook up your source control provider like GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab.
Put simply: your security team will actually say yes to this one.
As a bonus - every environment is defined as code with Dev Container—no snapshots or mutable images but ephemeral consistent environments spun up for each task - critical to ensuring that agents run consistently without having “works on my machine” issues.
Stop shouting at your agent through prompts
We’ve all been there:
- “No, not like that. Try again.”
- “That’s closer, but can you make it more like…”
- “Actually, forget that approach, let me explain differently…”
In tools like Codex you’re stuck arguing with the agent through prompts. But Ona is built on a foundation and is built for humans to jump in when your agent almost gets it right, but not quite. You just open up your actual editor—VS Code, JetBrains, whatever you prefer—and jump in.
Caption: Pairing with Ona via a desktop editor like JetBrains, Cursor or Windsurf.
Switch from agent orchestrator to hands-on developer in one click. Review the generated code in your familiar environment, make tweaks, and then hand it back to the agent to continue.
Same environment, same tools, same flow state.
Sam’s great, but you don’t have to marry his models
Look, Sam Altman seems like a nice guy but why should your entire AI strategy be tied to one company’s model roadmap? What happens when OpenAI decides to change their terms of service? Or now that Claude is outperforming GPT on code generation? Or when your company wants to use a specialized model trained on your specific domain?
With Ona, you’re not locked into the OpenAI ecosystem. You can bring your own model with whatever works best for your use case. Your infrastructure, your models, your rules. It’s not just about flexibility but about future-proofing so you’re not locked into any provider as models are continuing to improve weekly if not daily. It’s important to be able to adapt.
‘Codex for enterprise’ is available today
In short, if you love Codex, you’re going to really love Ona. It’s not a different paradigm—it’s the same paradigm but with enterprise-grade infrastructure underneath and power integrations to developer workflows. It’s the weekend magic at work, without the shadow IT.
| Feature | Codex | Ona |
|---|---|---|
| Background execution | ||
| Agents can run in parallel | ||
| Runs in your VPC | ||
| Choose your own model | ||
| Environment editor access | ||
| Ephemeral environments | ||
| BitBucket and GitLab support | ||
| Enterprise features (SSO, audit) |
Ready to bring your weekend coding superpowers to your day job?
Get access to Ona today ↓
