Why we built Islo:  AI coding agents need an execution layer

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Incredibuild Team

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3–4 minutes

For years, Incredibuild has helped engineering teams remove bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle by accelerating builds. But as AI begins to generate more of the code, a new constraint is emerging.

AI agents don’t fail at coding. They fail at execution.

Today,  teams are trying to run AI agents on infrastructure and processes designed for humans: one developer, one machine, short-lived CI jobs. The result is a fragile system where agents stop when laptops close, lose context between runs, and struggle to reliably ship code.

Instead of continuous progress, you get Discontinuous Development—work that starts and stops, loses state, and never compounds the way we know it can.

The shift: From CI pipelines to continuous execution

AI changes the shape of development.

It’s no longer about triggering a pipeline and waiting for results. It’s about enabling agents to run continuously—writing code, building it, testing it, fixing it, and repeating the loop without interruption.

To support this, we need something new:

An execution layer for software development.

This is what we built with Islo.

What Islo does

Islo is an execution control plane for AI-driven development. It allows teams to run coding agents continuously, securely, and reproducibly—without being tied to local machines or fragile CI jobs.

At its core, Islo introduces persistent execution environments (what we call Living Environments): cloud-based environments where an agent’s tools, services, and state remain alive across iterations.

Instead of restarting from scratch on every run, agents operate in a continuous loop:

  • A developer, or trigger from another system, starts an agent’s task
  • Islo provisions or attaches to a persistent environment
  • The agent runs: build → test → fix → validate
  • Results are committed, and the environment remains available for the next iteration

This enables true always-on development, where agents don’t stop when a laptop closes or a CI job ends.

All of this is defined through a version-controlled islo.yaml file, which describes the full execution context—making environments reproducible, shareable, and consistent across teams.

Built for enterprise constraints

Running agents continuously raises a fundamental challenge: how do you give them power without compromising security?

Islo is designed with scoped autonomy and hardware-level isolation:

  • Dedicated execution per agent: each agent runs in its own isolated environment with a separate kernel boundary
  • Credential-blind execution: agents never hold credentials. Access is enforced at the network boundary through a host-side proxy
  • Policy-driven control: teams define what agents can access, where they can run, and what they are allowed to execute

This allows organizations to safely run agents inside their own environment—without exposing IP or sensitive systems.


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Beyond running agents: Accelerating execution

Running agents continuously is necessary—but not sufficient.

As agents scale, the real bottleneck becomes execution across the entire software pipeline: builds, tests, dependencies, and infrastructure overhead.

This is where Incredibuild’s foundation becomes critical.

Islo, when it harnesses the full capabilities of Incredibuild, doesn’t just run execution—it accelerates it:

  • Accelerating builds and workloads
  • Reusing computation through caching
  • Distributing execution across available compute

The result is not just always-on agents—but a faster time to market for every feature, bug fix, and product.

A new layer in the stack

We believe the next phase of software development won’t be defined by better models alone.

It will be defined by how effectively we can execute what those models produce.

From code generation → to continuous execution → to reliable delivery.

Islo is our step toward building that execution layer.

Islo is available today at islo.dev

By Shimon Hason, CEO of Incredibuild

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