OpenHands began as an open-source coding agent. It has grown into something more ambitious: model-agnostic infrastructure for engineering teams that treat agents as part of the team — the layer that runs them, secures them, and decides when their work is ready.
Co-founder and CEO Robert Brennan walks through how that works in practice. Agent Canvas manages multiple agents from the browser, each in a persistent cloud environment, with work triggered from GitHub, Slack, Jira, Linear or on a schedule. Keeping a fleet safe means role-based access control and credential isolation; keeping it affordable means benchmarking models against your own tasks and using acceptance-based evaluation to know when a lower-cost model is good enough.
Brennan's core argument is the destination: work automatically finds the right agent, gets completed and evaluated, and reaches a human only when judgment is required. A practical guide for anyone designing a secure agent fleet or automating a software-development workflow.