Recently, All Hands AI announced a $5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures. Robert Brennan, the company's co-founder and CEO, noted that as technology advances, programmers are increasingly burdened with mundane tasks such as writing unit tests, managing dependencies, and maintaining documentation—areas where AI can excel.
Image source: Generated by AI, provided by Midjourney
All Hands AI aims to develop a model-agnostic open-source AI agent to help developers reduce these tedious tasks, allowing them to focus more on creative work.
Brennan mentioned that the impressive Devin AI agent showcased by Cognition AI a few months ago, capable of planning and executing complex engineering tasks, sparked their imagination but also raised concerns about the technology being locked in a "walled garden," inaccessible to the developer community.
Thus, All Hands AI's open-source project, initially named OpenDevin, was later renamed OpenHands, and has now garnered over 30,000 stars and contributions from over 150 individuals on GitHub.
OpenHands is envisioned as a "smart partner" for developers, not only automating test writing and application deployment but also actively identifying changes between files, asking developers if they need to adjust related code.
Joff Redfern, a partner at Menlo Ventures, stated that AI will revolutionize the way developers work, but they will still prefer open-source technologies. All Hands AI's openness will help the software engineering community move towards an ideal AI-driven development experience.
Brennan and his two co-founders have extensive experience in natural language processing and agent system construction. They believe that while tools like Copilot are helpful to developers, they have not yet achieved a complete "intelligent coding loop," which is their focus. Nonetheless, Brennan acknowledges that developers will remain involved in the process for the foreseeable future.
Currently, All Hands AI is researching how to provide the best user experience, with plans to integrate soon with development environments like VS Code. Although they intend to introduce paid enterprise-level closed-source features to generate revenue, their immediate priority after funding is to refine their technology stack.
Key Points:
- 💰 All Hands AI secures $5 million in funding, focusing on developing an open-source AI assistant.
- 🤖 New project OpenHands aims to automate developers' daily chores, enhancing productivity.
- 📈 Future integration with mainstream development environments, exploring enterprise-level paid features.