OpenHands

OpenHands (formerly OpenDevin) is an open-source autonomous software engineering agent that plans and executes complex development tasks inside a sandboxed Docker environment. With 75,000+ GitHub stars, it is one of the most starred AI coding projects.

Top features

• Autonomous task execution: given a natural-language goal, OpenHands plans steps, writes code, runs commands, and verifies results without human intervention.
• Sandboxed Docker runtime: all execution happens inside an isolated container, protecting the host system from unintended changes.
• Multi-step planning: breaks complex requests into subtasks, executes them sequentially, and recovers from errors.
• Browser automation: can navigate web pages, fill forms, and extract data for tasks that require web interaction.
• Extensible agent architecture: swap or customize the underlying agent logic, models, and tool integrations.
• Evaluation harness: includes benchmarks for measuring agent performance on real software engineering tasks.

Use cases

• Implement a full feature from an issue description: planning, coding, testing, and documentation.
• Refactor legacy codebases with automated verification that behavior is preserved.
• Build and deploy prototypes from high-level specifications.
• Run autonomous bug bounties or security audits on open-source projects.
• Evaluate and compare different LLM capabilities on standardized software engineering benchmarks.