Sandboxes Aren't Optional: 4 Ways to Isolate Coding Agents — Robert Brennan, OpenHands
AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 · 14:22
AI coding agents and software development automation
All Hands AI, now publicly branded OpenHands, builds an open-source platform for running AI coding agents. Individual developers and engineering teams use it to review pull requests, investigate CI failures, update dependencies, and propose code changes while retaining human review and approval. Workflows can run locally, through OpenHands Cloud, or inside an enterprise VPC, using different agents and models. Its Agent Control Plane gives platform and security teams control over agent access, execution environments, spending, and audit records.
The company was founded by Robert Brennan, its current CEO, Xingyao Wang, Chief AI Officer, and Graham Neubig, Chief Scientist. Its engineering work includes the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, which lets developers build agents with custom tools and memory management. The architecture combines sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-independent routing, and portable local-to-remote execution, allowing teams to customize agent behavior and move execution between environments.
By August 2026, the company reported more than 9 million open-source downloads, 85,000 GitHub stars, and 500 contributors. These community measures sit alongside a commercial offering focused on team coordination, cloud deployment, and advanced user management. OpenHands raised an $18.8 million Series A led by Madrona in 2025 to support its coding-agent platform.
AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 · 14:22
AI Engineer World's Fair 2025 · 16:46
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