Why we acquired Shipyard

Recently, we introduced The Autonomous Operations Factory - bringing together Aiden agents for AI SRE, unified observability at scale, infrastructure operations, and DevOps delivery on a shared model and governance framework. Today, we are expanding those capabilities. StackGen has acquired Shipyard, an ephemeral environment management platform.

Here is the reasoning.

The core question facing enterprise adoption

When evaluating autonomous operations, organizations initially ask what AI agents are capable of executing. Immediately following, however, is the critical question: how do you verify that a change is safe prior to execution?

This concern becomes more urgent as AI agents gain sophistication. Direct actions on live deployments - such as altering configurations, remediating incidents, or updating scaling policies - carry significant operational risks. Data from our State of Reliability 2026 report highlights this reality: AI now triggers approximately 10% of disclosed corporate incidents (a six-fold increase over three years), with at least nine recorded instances of an AI agent independently performing destructive actions on production environments.

To address this, the industry has historically relied on governance mechanisms - policies, sign-offs, and audit trails. But governance only confirms that a change was authorized and approved; it cannot predict the actual real-world impact of a change. To understand that impact, you need a dedicated testing environment.

StackGen’s current solutions offered through Aiden agentic OS already carried these governance mechanisms including policies, Human-in-loop reviews for agents, and audit trails. And with Shipyard, StackGen is now extending that safety coverage to autonomous coding agents - specifically testing what happens immediately after a pull request.

What Shipyard is

Shipyard builds a complete, isolated, production-like copy of an application on demand, from the application’s own definition, and destroys it when the work is done. A developer opens a pull request and a full running environment appears within minutes, wired into the GitHub or GitLab workflows the team already uses. No drift between the environment you tested in and the one you ship to.

Enterprise and high-growth engineering teams at companies like PepsiCo and Rippit use it this way today.

What the factory becomes with Shipyard

The Autonomous Operations Factory creates changes, deploys them, and manages them in production. Shipyard introduces the crucial missing link: a real-world testing ground to validate changes beforehand.

By provisioning production-like ephemeral environments, Shipyard lets teams execute proposed modifications, evaluate impact on reliability and cost, and confirm side effects before making a deployment decision.

Moving from static sign-offs to active, real-world validation provides a dependable mechanism to verify AI agent outputs - enabling enterprises to scale automation with confidence.

The other reason, which was true before we thought about the factory at all

Ephemeral environments have always mattered for testing. AI agents have multiplied the capacity those environments need to handle. This is where Shipyard by StackGen helps enterprises ship with confidence.

AI coding agents such as Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor generate far more code than traditional review workflows can handle, and that code needs to run in a real environment before deployment, on the clouds teams already run, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, with their managed Kubernetes and container services. Shipyard environments connect directly to agents through an MCP server and CLI. An agent can spin up an environment, execute tests against the live application, review results, and iterate before an engineer ever needs to review it. Combined with AI agents that themselves require safe testing grounds before release, demand for disposable environments is accelerating rapidly.

What the people using it say

What changes for Shipyard customers

Shipyard continues on its own site, under the Shipyard by StackGen name, available to existing customers and to new ones. The team that built it joins StackGen. Support comes from the StackGen team, and how you raise an issue does not change.

What comes next

Looking ahead, Shipyard’s ephemeral environment technology will enhance agent capabilities throughout the operations lifecycle. We look forward to demonstrating these integrated use cases live in H2 2026.

Shipyard is available today at shipyard.build.