arXiv subjects

Robert Brennan

Publications and source records attributed to Robert Brennan.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents

Agents are now used widely in the process of software development, but building production-ready software engineering agents is a complex task. Deploying software agents effectively requires flexibility in implementation and experimentation, reliable and secure execution, and interfaces for users to interact with agents. In this paper, we present the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, a toolkit for implementing software development agents that satisfy these desiderata. This toolkit is a complete architectural redesign of the agent components of the popular OpenHands framework for software development agents. To achieve flexibility, we design a simple interface for implementing agents that requires only a few lines of code in the default case, but is easily extensible to more complex full-featured agents with features such as custom tools, memory management, and more. For security and reliability, it delivers seamless local-to-remote execution portability, integrated REST/WebSocket services. For interaction with human users, it can connect directly to a variety of interfaces, such as visual workspaces (VSCode, VNC, browser), command-line interfaces, and APIs. Compared with existing SDKs from OpenAI, Claude and Google, OpenHands uniquely integrates native sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, and built-in security analysis. We validate the architecture empirically: production deployment data shows that V1 substantially reduces system-attributable failures over V0 with negligible event-sourcing overhead, and evaluations across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate strong agent performance. Put together, these elements allow the OpenHands Software Agent SDK to provide a practical foundation for prototyping, unlocking new classes of custom applications, and reliably deploying agents at scale.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Code with Me or for Me? How Increasing AI Automation Transforms Developer Workflows

Developers now have access to a growing array of increasingly autonomous AI tools for software development. While many studies examine copilots that provide chat assistance or code completions, evaluations of coding agents -- which can automatically write files and run code -- still rely on static benchmarks. We present the first controlled study of developer interactions with coding agents, characterizing how more autonomous AI tools affect productivity and experience. We evaluate two leading copilot and agentic coding assistants, recruiting participants who regularly use the former. Our results show agents can assist developers in ways that surpass copilots (e.g., completing tasks humans may not have accomplished) and reduce the effort required to finish tasks. Yet challenges remain for broader adoption, including ensuring users adequately understand agent behaviors. Our findings reveal how workflows shift with coding agents and how interactions differ from copilots, motivating recommendations for researchers and highlighting challenges in adopting agentic systems.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents

Software is one of the most powerful tools that we humans have at our disposal; it allows a skilled programmer to interact with the world in complex and profound ways. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and affect change in their surrounding environments. In this paper, we introduce OpenHands (f.k.a. OpenDevin), a platform for the development of powerful and flexible AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to those of a human developer: by writing code, interacting with a command line, and browsing the web. We describe how the platform allows for the implementation of new agents, safe interaction with sandboxed environments for code execution, coordination between multiple agents, and incorporation of evaluation benchmarks. Based on our currently incorporated benchmarks, we perform an evaluation of agents over 15 challenging tasks, including software engineering (e.g., SWE-BENCH) and web browsing (e.g., WEBARENA), among others. Released under the permissive MIT license, OpenHands is a community project spanning academia and industry with more than 2.1K contributions from over 188 contributors.

cs.SE↗