Definition
Plain language
An open-source framework for building software-engineering AI agents.
As stated in the literature
An open-source agent platform (formerly OpenDevin) providing tools, environments, and harnesses for autonomous software engineering tasks.
Why it matters: A shared agent platform makes software-engineering agent research cumulative rather than every group rebuilding scaffolding from scratch.
For example, a developer might use OpenHands to spin up an agent that clones a repo, runs the test suite, and proposes a fix for a failing test.
Heard on the show
“… and broken agent is the thing every coding agent you've heard of — Cursor, Devin, Claude Code, OpenHands — runs into some version of, even if their teams don't always say so out loud. …”Episode 016 — Why Your Coding Agent Stalls While the GPU Runs Hot