OpenHands, formerly known as OpenDevin, is an open-source platform for building and deploying AI agents that emulate human software developers by modifying code, executing shell commands, browsing the web, and interacting with APIs. It addresses the challenge of automating real-world software development tasks by providing a composable Python SDK and CLI that lets users define agents in code and run them locally or scale to thousands of agents in the cloud. OpenHands has demonstrated strong practical capability by solving over 50 percent of real GitHub issues in software engineering benchmarks.
OpenHands provides a secure sandboxed environment where AI agents operate within Docker containers accessed via SSH, preserving the semantics of human-initiated remote development while preventing agents from affecting the host system. The SDK serves as the engine powering the platform, enabling developers to compose agents with custom tools, workflows, and LLM configurations using Claude, GPT, or any other supported model. Agents can modify codebases intelligently, run shell commands, browse the web for documentation or debugging information, interact with APIs, and manage complete project lifecycles from implementation through testing.
OpenHands is designed for researchers, platform engineers, and development teams who want to build custom AI software engineering agents tailored to their specific workflows and codebases. Licensed under MIT, it fosters community-driven development and eliminates vendor lock-in, making it the most extensible open-source alternative to commercial AI coding agents like Devin. Compared to single-purpose AI coding tools, OpenHands provides the infrastructure for building entire AI development pipelines, making it ideal for organizations that want to experiment with autonomous agents or build proprietary AI engineering capabilities on top of a proven open-source foundation.
