Namespace: CI/CD is Dead, Agents Need Computers

Why agents need more than pipelines — they need computers

Today’s CI/CD pipelines were built for a world where humans submitted a manageable number of pull requests—not one where software is shipped by both people and agents across many repositories and at far greater scale. In the current environment, branches, builds, and test runs grow sharply, queues form on runners, and every extra minute of build time is multiplied across many more pull requests. The CI/CD pipeline as we know it — a static, sequential checklist designed for human-paced development — is dead. What agents need isn't a pipeline. It's a computer: an environment where they can build, test, and deploy autonomously at their own speed.

As AI workloads increasingly dominate the percentage of total workloads, CI/CD has become one of the largest, least‑optimized line items in the infrastructure budget for AI‑heavy and microservices‑heavy organizations. The answer isn't a faster pipeline — it's a fundamentally different primitive. Agents and developers need on-demand, high-performance compute environments purpose-built for building and shipping software, not a queue of sequential steps designed for a handful of daily pull requests.

After deep evaluation across the cloud development landscape, we believe Namespace has emerged as the frontrunner in building agent computers — high-performance, on-demand compute environments where both agents and humans build, test, and ship software. Namespace already serves hundreds of engineering organizations including Fal.ai, LiveKit, Zed.dev, Verkada, Vanta, Isometric, Framer, and Dagger. Namespace meets teams where they are — GitHub Actions, self‑hosted runners, Kubernetes — and replaces the brittle pipeline model with compute environments that scale naturally as human and agent‑written code volumes spike.

Namespace accelerates the SDLC

Namespace offers intelligent execution for GitHub Actions, Docker images and layers, and other compute‑intensive workloads, delivering consistent speed improvements. The product is designed to drop into a team’s existing tools, including GitHub Actions backends and environments that rely on self‑hosted runners or Kubernetes, so engineering organizations can integrate Namespace without rearchitecting their pipelines.

Namespace's platform comes with built-in capabilities that make them production-ready out of the box:

• Keeps builds hot with Turbo Docker Builds, incremental runs, and remote caching so teams see materially faster pipelines on the same workflows.

• Surfaces where money and time are going with Workflow Analytics and performance insights that tie duration, flakiness, and resource usage to specific jobs and repositories.

• Bakes in production‑grade ops—built‑in observability, a high‑performance private container registry, and remote SSH/VNC access—so platform teams do not have to bolt on separate tools to debug or run ephemeral workloads.

• Spins up fully reproducible, resource‑isolated development environments in seconds with configurable Devboxes so every engineer codes against the same dependencies, tools, and runtimes without local setup or drift.

On top of the enthusiasm our own team has for Namespace, what’s truly impressive is how genuinely excited users are about the solution.

• “I can't say enough good things about Namespace. We've been customers for Ghostty for 2 years now (we pay them), and their pricing and support has been A+.”

  Mitchell Hashimoto, Co-founder of Hashicorp (exited to IBM for $6B)

•  “Namespace has been rock-solid for us, the caching feature delivers speeds unmatched by default runners, and the ability to interactively debug runs is a killer. Team is also super responsive, even gave us some tips on how to improve internal infra. Overall very happy!”

  Christian Mladenov, Fal.ai Engineer

• “Namespace is the best dev infrastructure tool I’ve used in years. The product works flawlessly, it’s cheaper and faster than GitHub runners with much better observability, and most importantly the support is incredible. Could not recommend Namespace enough.”

  Aloke Desai, Warp Founding Engineer

Infrastructure orchestration experts

Hugo Santos, Namespace Founder & CEO,  saw the jamming of CI/CD pipelines firsthand while leading large‑scale infrastructure at Google's microservices team, where slow, brittle pipelines could directly slow product teams that operated at global scale, and while running developer platforms that had to stay reliable, performant, and simple to adopt for hundreds of internal teams.

That experience—building and running developer platforms at Google scale—shows up in how Hugo and the Namespace team operate today: they are obsessive about building the best product for developers, prioritize clean integration into existing CI/CD tooling over forcing re‑platforms, and focus on abstracting away the CI/CD bottlenecks that are breaking under current workloads. That rigor on technical quality and developer experience has helped them attract engineers who have built systems at the scale of modern cloud providers and leading developer platforms.

NEA leads Namespace’s Series A

Today, Namespace announced its Series A financing and we are thrilled to have led the round and to partner with Hugo and the team. In a world where CI/CD has become one of the largest, least‑optimized infrastructure line items for AI‑heavy and microservices‑heavy teams, Namespace is the company turning that bottleneck into a performance system and a core source of leverage in the SDLC.

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Namespace is hiring exceptional engineers and operators, and you can see their open roles at their career page.