Programming is inherently a creative endeavor, but in this age of left-shifting, much of a developer's day is filled with what Robert Brennan, co-founder and CEO of All Hands AI, calls “labor-oriented tasks,” like writing unit tests, managing dependencies, keeping documentation up to date, etc. Meanwhile, AI may not be creative, but it's pretty good at these very mundane tasks.
All Hands AI, which announced a $5 million seed round of funding led by Menlo Ventures on Thursday, aims to build model-agnostic, open-source AI agents that will handle much of that work, freeing up developers to spend more time doing what they do best.
Image credit: All Hands AI
A few months ago, AI Cognition unveiled Devin, an AI agent that can plan and execute complex engineering tasks, and more importantly, build and deploy new applications end-to-end.
“The Cognition folks showed Devin a demo, and I, and every software engineer around the world, was blown away by that video,” Brennan said in an interview ahead of Thursday's announcement. “I think it sparked our imaginations about what the future of development could be, but at the same time, we were all a little scared that it was being developed closed source and locked into walled gardens that we couldn't see, couldn't contribute to, and couldn't really own as a development community.”
The open source project, which began as OpenDevin earlier this year and is now called OpenHands, began as a text file on GitHub and now has over 30,000 stars and over 150 contributors.
Image credit: All Hands AI
The goal of an OpenHands agent is to be a proactive pair programmer who can work hand in hand with developers and handle many of the heavy lifting of a developer's day to day work. This might include writing tests and deploying the application, but it might also include recognizing that a change in one file (such as a function name) might affect the functionality of other parts of the application, and asking the developer if the affected files need to be adjusted accordingly.
“AI will completely change the way developers work, but developers' preferences for adopting open source remain unchanged, especially when it comes to technology that impacts their daily work,” said Joff Redfern, partner at Menlo Ventures and former chief product officer at Atlassian. “By building in the open, All Hands is helping the software engineering community realize the ideal AI-powered development experience.”
Image credit: All Hands AI
Brennan and his two co-founders, Xinyao Wang (Chief AI Officer) and Graham Neubig (Chief Scientist), have extensive experience in natural language processing and building agents. Brennan previously worked on document summarization at Google and later held executive roles in machine learning and infrastructure projects at several startups. Neubig is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and has extensive experience in natural language processing. Wang took a break from his PhD studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to work on conversational language agents using foundational models.
“No one was surprised when we saw the Cognition demo on the technology side,” Brennan says. “We knew it existed, but seeing it all come together as a user experience really got us excited about building it in the open.”
Brennan also noted that while tools like Copilot are extremely helpful to developers, they're not (yet) focused on the whole “agent-code-in-the-loop” thing like self-driving cars. That's still a somewhat ambitious goal, but it's what All Hands AI is aiming for. You can't give agents access to your company's entire JIRA backlog and let them just do all the tasks there. In fact, Brennan, like most people in industry today, believes there will still need to be human developers in the loop.
Image credit: All Hands AI
There's also the open question of what the user/developer experience of such a system should actually be. All Hands AI has designers on staff who are excited to be tackling these issues at an early stage. Right now, the experience is still somewhat decoupled from the development environment, but the team plans to build integration with VS Code and other editors soon.
Like many open source startups, All Hands AI hopes to monetize its service by offering closed-source enterprise features for a fee. “We think there's a lot of software that complements open source that can really bring value to large enterprises. Building it in a closed-source way ensures that we have a sustainable open source project that can be funded by the large companies that are using it,” Brennan says.
But with this first funding round, the team plans to build out its technology stack before moving further into monetizing its service. In addition to Menlo, which led the round, Pillar VC, Betaworks, and Rebellion also participated. The company also brought on a number of angel investors, including Hugging Face co-founder Thom Wolf, Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher, and PyTorch creator and Meta VP Soumith Chintala.