Parker McKeeWe are witnessing the second major shift in the world of software. The history of software began with tools to help people organize and manage their work. The second phase today is focused on assistants/co-pilots that exist alongside humans to collaboratively generate work. Over the coming years, we are going to transition from assistants/co-pilots toward complete automation.
The shift can be seen across domains but software engineering is a perfect microcosm of this evolution. Assistants like Github Co-Pilot and Cursor are driving massive productivity gains but the evolution of software development will not end here.
The next frontier is systems that entirely automate the job of architecting, writing, documenting, testing, and deploying code. The largest group of builders on this topic have come together around an open-source project called OpenHands (FKA OpenDevin). 150+ contributors strong, the OpenHands community has built a top-performing coding agent(per OSS SWE-bench lite, scoring: 26%). Their goal; automate as much of the software engineering job as possible. Today the community is focused on the automation of “toil-oriented tasks” like unit tests and dependency management but will continue to push the road map alongside the frontiers of research.
All Hands AI, a new company founded by the three maintainers of the OpenHands project, is focused on continuing the project’s development. Alongside open source contribution, the company will also bring to market an enterprise version.
One of All Hands’ key differentiators is that they are not building a foundation model. Instead, they’re creating a framework that empowers independent contributors to create smaller application-specific agents. The OpenHands system then has the ability to delegate tasks or ask for help from a wide breadth of agents within the agent library. We believe an open-source approach is the only way to achieve total task and integration coverage in a space as vast as software engineering.
All Hands wants to foster a new era of software development and change the way that engineers build. If you’re interested in joining this movement, you can get involved here.
Given that software is a cornerstone of society and $1 trillion+ is spent each year on SW R&D, we found this mission worth supporting. We are excited to work with All Hands’ founders Robert, Xingyao, and Graham and to partner with Menlo Ventures on their $5M seed round.