Lou Bichard

The Missing Primitive for Agent Swarms — Lou Bichard, Ona

May 23, 2026 · 18:37

Lou Bichard, field CTO at Owner, argues that agent swarm infrastructure for coding agents is missing a coordination primitive, while runtimes and orchestration are largely solved. He defines a Software Factory as incrementally removing humans from the SDLC and highlights internal systems from Stripe (Minions) and RAMP (Inspect) as real-world examples. Owner provides VM-level isolation for agent fleets and sub-agent patterns, demonstrated with a demo of process-based and VM-based swarms. Bichard identifies GitHub as a poor coordination layer for hundreds of parallel pull requests and proposes solutions like state machines, durable execution, and a CLI gateway that any local agent can invoke to check progress. He notes context rot and agents skipping steps as key challenges, and announces a public two-week project to build a Software Factory from scratch starting next week.

Building agent fleet architectures your CISO doesn't hate — Lou Bichard, Gitpod

Jun 27, 2025 · 13:52

Lou Bichard explains how Gitpod evolved from a managed SaaS to a 'bring your own cloud' architecture that satisfies CISOs in regulated industries by running secure dev environments—and now agent fleets—on customer infrastructure via a simple runner (a single ECS task) instead of complex Kubernetes. The platform, used by banks and healthcare firms for 37 hours per week per developer, reduces operational overhead through a cloud-formation-based setup that takes three minutes. For agents, the same infrastructure provides source code access and audit logging, ensuring privacy and compliance. Bichard argues that vendors should simplify architectures to lower customers' day-two costs, and advises buyers to prioritize security and ownership models when selecting AI tools.