At its best, programming is a creative endeavor, but in this age of left-leaning, a large part of a developer’s day is filled with: All Hands AI Robert Brennan, the company’s co-founder and CEO, calls the tasks that require tedious effort writing unit tests, managing dependencies, and updating documentation. On the other hand, AI may not be creative, but it is very good at performing these routine tasks.
All Hands AI, which announced a $5 million seed funding round led by Menlo Ventures on Thursday, aims to build open-source, model-independent AI agents that can handle most of that hard work and let developers focus more of their time on what they do best.
A few months ago, the AI Cognition program was launched. Show Devinan AI agent that can plan and execute complex engineering tasks—and perhaps most importantly: build and deploy new applications from start to finish.
“The Cognition team did a demo of Devin, and that video blew my mind — and I think every other software engineer in the world — and I think it really sparked our imagination about what the future of development would look like, but it also kind of scared us that it was being developed as closed source and it was being kept in this walled garden that we couldn’t see and contribute to and really own as a development community,” Brennan said in an interview ahead of the announcement on Thursday.
this Open source projectThe OpenDevin project, which began earlier this year as OpenDevin and is now called OpenHands, started with a text file on GitHub and now has over 30,000 stars and over 150 contributors.
The idea is for the OpenHands agent to become a proactive binary programmer working alongside the developer who can handle a significant amount of the developer’s day-to-day work. This might include writing tests and deploying the application, but also recognizing that a change in one file (perhaps a function name) could affect how other parts of the application work and asking the developer if they should modify the affected files accordingly.
“AI will completely change how developers work. But it won’t change their preference for open source, especially when it comes to technology that impacts their day-to-day work,” said Geoff 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 work toward an optimal AI-powered development experience.”
Brennan and his co-founders, Shengyao Wang (Chief AI Officer) Graham Newbig (Senior Scientist), with extensive experience working in natural language processing and building agents. Brennan previously worked in document summarization at Google and then in executive roles at a number of startups, working on machine learning and infrastructure projects. Newbig is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University with extensive experience in natural language processing; Wang is intervening in his PhD program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he conducted research on interactive language agents that run on foundational models.
“None of us were surprised to see Cognition’s offering in terms of technology,” Brennan said. “We all knew this was there, but seeing everything come together into one user experience was really exciting for us to start pushing toward building this out in the open.”
Brennan also noted that while tools like Copilot are great for developers, they don’t (yet) focus on the full “agent loop for writing code” a la a self-driving car. That’s what All Hands AI is aiming for, even if that’s still a bit ambitious. It’s not like you can give an agent access to a company’s entire JIRA ledger and let them do every single task in it. In fact, Brennan — like most people in the industry today — believes that there will be a need for human developers in the loop for a very long time.
There are still unresolved questions about what the user/developer experience for such a system should look like. However, All Hands AI has a designer on staff, and it’s good to see them looking into these questions early on. Right now, the experience is still somewhat separate from the development environment, but the team plans to build integrations with VS Code and other editors soon.
Like many open source startups, All Hands AI expects to monetize its services by offering paid, closed-source enterprise features. “We think there’s a suite of software that we can build that complements open source and provides real value to large enterprises where we can feel good about building that in a closed-source way to help ensure that we have a sustainable open source project that gets financial input from the larger companies that use it,” Brennan said.
With this first round of funding, the team plans to build out its technology stack before diving deeper into monetizing the service. In addition to Menlo, which led the round, Pillar VC, Betaworks, and Rebellion also participated. The company also brought on a number of angels, including Hugging Face co-founder Thom Wolf; Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher; and PyTorch founder and Meta VP Soumith Chintala.