What if Devin is down?
Devin Oncall is one AI on-call vendor. Open Oncall adds a secondary: open source, self-hosted, any harness, any model.
Every serious on-call rotation has a primary, a secondary and an escalation chain. Nobody trusts one person to be awake for everything. So why would your AI on-call run on one provider?
That is the idea behind Open Oncall, launching today. It is our open answer to Devin Oncall, and we think AI on-call needs a secondary.
A scenario for 3:14 am
This is a scenario, not an incident report. It is 3:14 am, and PagerDuty fires an alert. Open Oncall opens a thread in Slack and starts the investigation with traces, logs and recent deploys.
Then the primary agent times out. The swarm does not wait for a human to notice. It moves the same investigation to the next harness, on its own.
The investigation finishes in the same thread: root cause, evidence and a proposed fix. Maya, an on-call engineer in this scenario, opens the approval link. The fix PR opens, the checks go green, and Maya goes back to sleep.
Why one provider is a single point of failure
Devin Oncall is generally available now. It takes alerts from Slack, Teams and PagerDuty, and it uses your telemetry, code, deployments, runbooks and past incidents. It runs on Cognition's hosted platform, and we found no self-hosted option. Its launch post says the architecture lets Cognition choose the best model for each on-call task. That is a sensible design. It is still one vendor, on infrastructure you do not run, making the call at 3 am.
A single-vendor AI on-call is also a new lock-in. The context it builds up, your runbooks and incident history, is the part you need when you move. Keep that context somewhere you control.
Open Oncall: primary, secondary, then the chain
Open Oncall is part of Agent Swarm. It is MIT licensed and self-hosted. You choose the harness (Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode) and the model. Alerts can come from PagerDuty, Datadog, Grafana, Opsgenie, Sentry, SigNoz or any webhook.
If the provider running a step fails, the same step re-runs on the next harness. A person still approves before any fix PR opens, through a link in the Slack thread.
Run it yourself
The replication guide walks through the whole setup. You import the workflow and its failover sub-workflow, add the script and the app, then point PagerDuty at your workflow webhook. It also covers a failover drill, so you can test the secondary before you need it: Open Oncall replication guide.
Sleep better
Sleep better without relying on a single provider. Set up Open Oncall with a secondary, run the drill, and tell us where it breaks.
Related reading: How to avoid vendor lock-in for coding agents.
Related field notes
How to Avoid Vendor Lock-In for Coding Agents: A Layer-by-Layer Exit Test
Coding-agent lock-in lives in the context layers, not the model. Audit eight layers, run the exit test, and keep memory and traces exportable.
Shared-Context AI Agents: Patterns, Risks, and Setup
What shared-context AI agents are, how shared context differs from memory and private state, the risks, and how to run governed sharing.
We Deleted --resume: A Bounded Preamble Beats Session Resume
Why Agent Swarm dropped claude --resume and codex.resumeThread for an approximately 2,000-token context preamble that survives container restarts and harness re-routing.