GitHub veteran Brian Douglas launches Paper Compute to fix AI agent infrastructure

Brian Douglas, former GitHub director of developer advocacy and founder of Open Sauced, has launched Paper Compute Company alongside CTO John McBride to build open source infrastructure for AI agents in production. The startup has released two tools: Tapes, a zero-instrumentation observability layer that intercepts and records agent activity without code changes, and StereOS, a hardened Linux OS for running agents in isolated sandboxed environments. Together they aim to give teams visibility into what agents are doing and control over how far they can go. The longer-term vision is a pay-per-compute platform that turns agent telemetry into reusable skills and targets regulated or on-premise environments needing auditability and compliance. Douglas draws parallels to the Kubernetes wave, predicting open source will commoditize AI agent tooling within six months.