A weekend, a fork, and a very good year for open source.
On a March weekend in 2024, Robert Brennan watched Cognition AI's Devin demo along with a few million other engineers. The reaction split into two camps. One camp posted "wow." The other camp posted "wow, but." Brennan was in the second camp, and by Monday there was a text file on GitHub. The file was called OpenDevin. Within a year it had 30,000 stars, 150 contributors, a new name (OpenHands), and roughly $23.8 million in venture capital attached to it.
The company, All Hands AI, is now based in Los Angeles and employs about 36 people. Its CEO lives in Boston. Its Chief Scientist is a Carnegie Mellon professor. Its Chief AI Officer is a research prodigy. Its central premise is that an AI coding agent should be MIT-licensed, model-agnostic, and installable in whichever IDE the developer already loves. Menlo Ventures wrote the seed. Madrona led the Series A in November 2025. Fujitsu Ventures is on the cap table, which is a sentence that would have been strange to write in 2019.
Brennan came to the moment already fluent in the underlying trades. At Google in the early 2010s he wrote an algorithm to extract answers from long documents, the kind of code that gets shipped inside Search when you ask why the sky is blue. It became US Patent US9940367B1 and quietly ran behind the scenes for years. Afterward, he co-founded DataFire, a platform for building APIs and integrations, and LucyBot, which handled the paperwork nobody wanted to do: automated API documentation. Then, as Director of Open Source at Fairwinds, he built Insights, a Kubernetes auditing tool for teams whose clusters were getting away from them.
The pattern is legible in retrospect. Each company automated something a developer would rather not do at 4pm on a Friday. OpenHands is the same idea at a different altitude. Brennan calls the target "toil-oriented tasks" - the writing of unit tests, the bumping of dependencies, the keeping of documentation vaguely in sync with reality. His argument is that agents will eat this work first because it is boring, high-volume, and low-risk. Craft stays with humans. Toil moves to the coding agent. Both sides get to keep the parts they like.
That framing is why the investor reaction to OpenHands is less confused than it looks. On paper, the company gives its core product away under the most permissive license in software. In practice, this is the whole point. An MIT-licensed agent gets through procurement at banks and defense contractors in a way a closed one does not. The community keeps the roadmap honest. The commercial layer, in Brennan's phrasing, is "software we can build that complements the open source, where we can feel good about building that in a closed source way." The distinction is not moral. It is architectural.