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
“There's a coding agent called OpenHands — seventy-thousand-plus stars on GitHub, a tool people genuinely run in production.”Episode 146 — How an Innocent README Can Freeze an AI Agent's Safety Check for an Hour