Why has no one been talking about Open Hands so far?

[-]

cuckfoders@reddit

It takes some effort to get it to work in windows/wsl, I had to read two pages of documentation to launch it - most devs just want to 'get going' for reference if it helps anyone, [https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/installation](https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/installation) [https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/runtimes/docker#connecting-to-your-filesystem](https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/runtimes/docker#connecting-to-your-filesystem) TLDR: for my usecase, mount code in my homedir \`\`\` export SANDBOX\_VOLUMES=$HOME/code:/workspace:rw docker pull [docker.all-hands.dev/all-hands-ai/runtime:0.39-nikolaik](http://docker.all-hands.dev/all-hands-ai/runtime:0.39-nikolaik) docker run -it --rm --pull=always \\ \-e SANDBOX\_RUNTIME\_CONTAINER\_IMAGE=docker.all-hands.dev/all-hands-ai/runtime:0.39-nikolaik \\ \-e LOG\_ALL\_EVENTS=true \\ \-e SANDBOX\_USER\_ID=$(id -u) \\ \-e SANDBOX\_VOLUMES=$SANDBOX\_VOLUMES \\ \-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \\ \-v \~/.openhands-state:/.openhands-state \\ \-p 3000:3000 \\ \--add-host host.docker.internal:host-gateway \\ \--name openhands-app \\ [docker.all-hands.dev/all-hands-ai/openhands:0.39](http://docker.all-hands.dev/all-hands-ai/openhands:0.39) \`\`\` and even then once I did and managed to attach it to an existing project, I still get some: "Your current workspace is not a git repository.Ask OpenHands to initialize a git repo to activate this UI." thing I think its good to play around with locally, by using it its helped me understand more how other tools work.

Reply

[-]

Environmental-Sun698@reddit

Imagine being so ignorant of security that you run \`-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock\` on your machine without giving it a second thought

Reply

[-]

trycrmr@reddit

Very similar experience setting this up today, including the error about the sandbox volume I mounted not being a git repo when it was. I could see the .git directory on the file system but not in the Open hands interface, but it was picking up the .vscode directory.

Reply

[-]

PnutPresident@reddit

pice of shit dosent work no matter whta model i select

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

So yeah, just checked All Hands AI (the company behind Open Hands) youtube channel and they only have 145 subscribers at the time of writing. Pointing to inexistent marketing effort.

Reply

[-]

neubig@reddit

Hey u/Mr_Moonsilver , dev here. Thanks for the feedback and we'll work to create more video content soon!

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

Hey, great to hear. I think this has huge potential. Do you have any intentions to bring a more easily deployable version as a VS-Code extension? I see the advantages of the docker instance, but a VS Code extension could go a long way too.

Reply

[-]

neubig@reddit

Yeah, it's one of our most popular feature requests and we plan to do it but the maintainers haven't done it ourselves and haven't gotten a contributor to donate one yet either: [https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands/issues/2469](https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands/issues/2469)

Reply

[-]

nealhamiltonjr@reddit

Are you saying that open hands will have a VS code plugin as in it's getting a IDE so we can code along and or review the code? I like antigravity for it's full IDE but it lacks sandboxing and it's not meant to be run remote or without a google account. I don't think you can use deep seek or a local model either. I hoping open hands gets gets a IDE and the ability to run remotely without all the hacks. Are you guys implementing the nginx reverse proxy yet as this was stated the cleanest way to get this working? I'm waiting for that since OH will be running on a vps on my local lan headless. Also, is there the ability to have sub agents and can they be antigenic? I've been using agent 0 for coding and it's kinda awesome even though it's not specifically made for it. I can use sub agents to get task completed and they can each learn which reduces the api calls. I think opencode is like this as well.

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

Just upped the request. I think this would really boost visibility, putting it next to Cline and Roo which are super popular in the communities. Thanks for a great product anyway, and I'm excited to see how this evolves!

Reply

[-]

Ragecommie@reddit

And there we go. I've been following OpenHands since the project started. It is a very capable framework, but unfortunately it is one of MANY at this point and the way the modern Internet and hype cycles work... Yeah.

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

What architectural debt? It has a solid base architecture with many features and has continually been extended. Actually the problem I saw with OH when I started contributing was that they received so many PRs that they had no time to approve them fast enough and just closed many of them. But to be honest, they are also very strict in keeping the code clean.

Reply

[-]

MrWeirdoFace@reddit

I will subscribe. Just tried it and I'm very pleased.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

FWIW, spent the past few hours trying Devstral with Roo and it works really well. Take those stars with a grain of salt. You can easily buy thousands for a few dollars, just like followers on other social media. I wanted to try OpenHands, but they don't make it easy to run the thing outside docker on a POSIX environment. They also don't make it easy to setup with your own API. I gave up after about an hour and switched to Roo to test the model. It's a development tool, and should make it easy for devs to set it up however they want, not how the team that created the tool wants.

Reply

[-]

neubig@reddit

Thanks for the feedback u/FullstackSensei ! Developer here. We're serious and the stars are real, but totally hear you on the install issues. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to set up with Docker, but getting it to work without docker is not as easy as it should be and we'll work on it. I created an issue here: [https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands/issues/8632](https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands/issues/8632)

Reply

[-]

nealhamiltonjr@reddit

Curios how often the devs check the users bug submitting? I tried to install OH on Debian Trixi the official way using uv and also the docker pull commands. Both resulting in the same bug..it can't connect to a sandbox or something..just a spinning wheel. Others are reporting the same but there's no attention to this from what it seems..not even a reply from the team. I'm not sure how we're suppose to trust a project when it doesn't even have proper support. Not trying to be rude ..just aggravated after wasting hours trying to get this to work only to find out others are have the exact same issue and it's been reported for sometime. [https://github.com/OpenHands/OpenHands/issues/12528#issuecomment-3944049209](https://github.com/OpenHands/OpenHands/issues/12528#issuecomment-3944049209)

Reply

[-]

pc-erin@reddit

I wasn't able to install it using docker. Keep getting this: \`\`\` $ docker pull [docker.all-hands.dev/all-hands-ai/runtime:0.39-nikolaik](http://docker.all-hands.dev/all-hands-ai/runtime:0.39-nikolaik) Error response from daemon: Get "https://docker.all-hands.dev/v2/": EOF \`\`\` Couldn't find anyone else having that problem in the github issues so maybe it's my ISP or something, but figured I'd mention it in case there's something wrong with the registry server.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

Thanks for taking the feedback with an open mind! I read in another comment that you bundle VS code Web and Jupyter. In a local setup, please consider making the tool independent of any such tools. Just setup the bare bones of Open Hands, without any 3rd party tools. The less dependencies you have, the easier it is to setup.

Reply

[-]

neubig@reddit

Yeah, that totally makes sense. Noted that on the issue too.

Reply

[-]

MSPlive@reddit

Frankly, i find it quite trivial to install it. Everything is nearly ready. [https://docs.all-hands.dev/usage/how-to/headless-mode](https://docs.all-hands.dev/usage/how-to/headless-mode) . Maybe at the time of your writing, it wasnt available?

Reply

[-]

hak8or@reddit

It's sadly getting absurdly common for developers, especially web developers like these, to entirely give up at the idea of caring about how to distribute their software, so they use a sledgehammer like docker instead. It's a shame too, because entirely userspace code running in such a heavily sandboxed environment like JavaScript is about as easy as you can get for distributing. You don't even need to care about if it's running atop musl or glibc or some freebsd craziness.

Reply

[-]

WarlaxZ@reddit

Docker is by design a seamless distribution platform, with one of its many great benefits is avoiding dependency inconsistency and 'works on my machine'

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

It's a distribution platform for services, not development tools. I don't want to waste resources on my development machine to run yet another instance of docker when I have it running on a Ubuntu server in my home network. Every other tool out there is either a VS Code extension or runs entirety in userspace. If they can't figure how to do either, to me it says more about the skill level of the devs. Using docker to distribute a development tool is a very heavy handed approach and a very restrictive one.

Reply

[-]

rusty_fans@reddit

Every other tool out there is useless as an vscode extension if you don't use vscode. Shipping a vscode extension is easy, shipping long-running processes that have dependencies and need to run on multiple distros/oses outside of a sandbox like vscode is not. Docker is great for server based software, which this is. This has nothing to do with skill level. Sometimes it is a bad use of dev time to waste effort trying to get a moderately complex software stack running on every distro/OS/packaging system out there when you can just ship a docker image. I have shipped software, both with docker and without, and the amount of time you have to spent on distribution instead of making your software better is non-neglible and it's not a question of skill-level if you prioritize one over the other. Also docker has it's issues, but the tiny bit of performance overhead is not it.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

The devs of open hands disagree with your characterization that this is server software. They say as much in the documentation. I've been working as a software engineer for almost 2 decades with half a dozen languages. The stack you chose to write your software in has a huge impact on how easy/hard it is to package and ship it for multiple OS'es. The argument that they prioritize other functionality ignores the fact that your product only has a market in so much as people are willing and able to use it. Having a dependency on docker and WSL puts a much higher barrier to entry and restricts the environments in which it can be used. Let's not pretend this was a trade-off. It was a design decision that could have been easily avoided by choosing a different tech stack or exploring different ways of packaging the product. They chose to make it into a docker image rather than a VS Code extension. There's a reason almost everyone else chooses to package their product as a VS Code extension.

Reply

[-]

Pyros-SD-Models@reddit

If, as a dev, you have issues with WSL and Docker, bleeding-edge computer science is probably not the hood you should walk around in. Please go back to your overengineered feel-good frameworks so you and other Angular Andies can wank over a new UI framework nobody cares about. It's a research project from like seven universities with 20 authors, not a polished mass-market app. Wasting time doing stupid shit like "lowering the barrier of entry" is just burning money you already don't have as a researcher. So you choose the easiest and fastest way so all your research authors can work on the project, and they decided that with Docker they could do this the fastest and most cost-efficiently. It's not exactly hard to understand, except for people who are struggling with Docker. The fact that this is even a discussion says more about your dev skills than about OpenHand's solution design. It also makes it pretty clear you've never worked in research. And frankly, devs who’ve never touched research are part of the 80% of grey slop that’ll be automated out of relevance in the next few years anyway, so you should have bigger problems to worry about than some agent's distribution vector. Let the people who are actually advancing the technology do their job. They know what they’re doing. I swear, these "why can't this cool-looking research project have a 1-click installer" people are the fucking worst. Or in this case, "why isn’t this a VSCode extension", holy shit, how many VSCode extension research projects do you know? And even devs of your caliber should be able to figure out why VSCode extensions are literally the worst way to publish your fucking research.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

Seems your typing skills far surpass your reading comprehension abilities. I swear these I can't read what's been said but I'm very angry so I'll make up some BS are fucking worst.

Reply

[-]

Educational-Coat8729@reddit

what? makes much more sense to have dependency on docker than a specific editor?

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

Only if you don't know any better and never seen any serious codebase that requires connecting to multiple services. The docker image already forces you to work with the web version of VS code. If your codebase is in windows, sharing it with the docker image is a hassle. If your codebase needs to connect to a DB, that's another hassle. And don't even get me started if you need to work with LDAP authentication... It packages other tools like jupyter that might not be needed. Saying it's a dependency on docker ignores everything around getting the the app you need to actually work with up and running.a

Reply

[-]

WarlaxZ@reddit

Worked on software for 20 years and still have such a glaringly bad skill issue 😂

Reply

[-]

rusty_fans@reddit

You know people use other IDE's than VSCode ?

Reply

[-]

rusty_fans@reddit

I will never use any vscode extension, I am happily using loads of docker images, maybe you're just not the target market? It's not incompetent to not build software how you personally want it.

Reply

[-]

GeneratedUsername019@reddit

Describe how you would implement Open Hands as a VS Code extension.

Reply

[-]

pip25hu@reddit

On paper, yes. But as it turns out, the same container that works on Linux won't necessarily run under Windows or Mac, not to mention ARM machines in general.

Reply

[-]

WarlaxZ@reddit

i will give you running on arm vs x86 can result in problems, as it is different. but its still going to be a lot less effort than compiling an executable for every platform and having to support the various issues separately and dig into ubuntu have some different default version of ssl vs redhat or some other nightmare

Reply

[-]

MoffKalast@reddit

And the bloat. The BLOAT. It ships an entire operating system with each container jesus christ.

Reply

[-]

thallazar@reddit

It optionally ships a kernel that is shared by any other containers that require it, optionally here being contingent on whether it can use your underlying host OS kernel, which for most cases is yes. A docker image only ships with the dependencies you select for your application. Learn docker before commenting garbage.

Reply

[-]

MoffKalast@reddit

Kernel != OS, yes images can sometimes use the host kernel, but it needs to always ship the entire userland. And if you're running a linux container on Windows it's a full VM.

Reply

[-]

thallazar@reddit

Linux container on windows uses WSL kernel if you've got it. Only if not do you use a full VM. Most containers don't ship an OS at all, only deps and runtime libraries.

Reply

[-]

MoffKalast@reddit

WSL is literally a VM though, just a slightly more integrated one. If these lightweight containers you speak of can function that way, then why are they containers in the first place? It should be possible to run them fully native. The way I see it the only excuse there is for running docker is if you *have* to run something that is fundamentally incompatible with the host system. Even building containers themselves creates so much cache trash that if you're careless enough you wake up one day with a system that doesn't boot because the disk is full. If that's not bloat I don't know what is.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

You're preaching to the wrong people. I find most people using containers don't understand how they work nor know of the existence of any alternatives. That's why you see so many open source tools that take several gigabytes of disk space when a compiled alternative would be a few dozen megabytes. They just don't know any better.a

Reply

[-]

Thomas-Lore@reddit

It often does not "work on my machine" though.

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

Distributing a complex environment with all its required tools for all OS's within a universal docker is one thing. But you also want to isolate the environment the agent has access to - i.e., the sandbox where the agent is running all commands. Docker is also a good option for this. When I have OpenHands, developing OpenHands itself, I have 2 level nested containers. That said, you can also run OpenHands in local mode (without using docker at all).

Reply

[-]

knownboyofno@reddit

I agree it isn't easy to set up outside of Unix or docker. I just ran it with the docker command on the model card and set up my api key in the ui within an hour. I have to do docker deployments a lot, but it is simple if you have docker installed.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

I know docker, but I refuse to waste resources on my dev machine just because the deva of some tool can't be bothered to think about that. It's a tool, it's supposed to make my life easier, not complicate it.

Reply

[-]

knownboyofno@reddit

I agree with you that they should make it easier to install without docker. It was annoying, but I didn't want to waste too much time getting it working when I had work to do.

Reply

[-]

Moist_Coach8602@reddit

Other devs give things up after an hour? I would of tried until I had to sleep and then think about the problem while laying in bed. Where does one learn this power?

Reply

[-]

leftsharkfuckedurmum@reddit

if I'm setting up a tool for a hobby project it's got 20 minutes max

Reply

[-]

Sunija_Dev@reddit

Oh, you won't get far in local AI then. And by "far" I mean either A) Setting up a thing for 12 hours, it still doesn't work. Or B) Setting it up for 6 hours, it works but the results are very underwhelming. You notice that the example outputs were heavily cherrypicked or - as usual - not existent. You ask online and somebody tells you it would work much better if also set up this RAG/agenic library. If you decide to do that, return to B.

Reply

[-]

Moist_Coach8602@reddit

This sort-of round-a-bout has been my experience as well.

Reply

[-]

MoffKalast@reddit

See this is why llama.cpp is so popular. You clone it, you build it, it runs. No conda, no pip, no bajillion conflicting python deps, no npm. This is how things should be.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

Which is exactly the reason why I use it along with ik_llama.cpp.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

I beg to differ. Tools are supposed to make our life easier, not the other way around. Sure there's a learning curve in setting up some things like inference servers, but those are something that you need to do once and you're done. Nowadays, I don't even bother downloading a model if clear instructions on which parameters to run it are included, or Unsloth doesn't provide a GGUF quant with said parameters. I'm not interested in fiddling with temo, top-p, etc to find what works best. There's plenty of models out there in in a week or two a new one will come out anyways that does marginally better.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

It's simple: change your mindset. The tool is supposed to work for you, not the other way around. There's plenty of other options out there and none is significantly better than the others. I could spend my time trying to get it to work, or I could use the time to test the model with Roo and get something useful done. I chose the latter.

Reply

[-]

tkenben@reddit

So you insist instead that everyone else must use VS Code extensions like you.

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

No, I insist that it should be something that is easy to run and doesn't require installing additional software or elevated privileges. I don't know what's so hard to understand about this. I use VS code extensions to drive that point home.

Reply

[-]

Marksta@reddit

That makes sense, the alternatives have you up and running in under 10 mins on Windows. Just hearing this description of yours, 100% no interest on my end.

Reply

[-]

ROOFisonFIRE_usa@reddit

The moment I hear docker I immediately lose interest.

Reply

[-]

Foreign-Beginning-49@reddit

Same here, but for a more niche development problem. My internet is so bad that if the docker download fails they do not have auto restart. I have to download the entire docker again. This has left me in the dust so many times I avoid it all together. There's gpu poor and then there's connection poor. I'm little bit of both. 😆 🤣

Reply

[-]

kmouratidis@reddit

> They also don't make it easy to setup with your own API. What do you mean? I just had to go to the settings (there aren't many) and then click on a toggle ("advanced", I think) and I could configure an OpenAI-compatible deployment (tried ollama and sglang). Did that not work for you?

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

Which is not documented anywhere. Their drop-down for model providers has a very long list yet no option for an OpenAI-compatible provider. And no, it did not work. My development machine is windows and my inference server runs Ubuntu. They don't support windows, nor running without docker. I tried to give them a shot by following the development setup, but the documentation is incomplete at best. It's a tool. It's supposed to work for me, not the other way around. I don't want to spend hours trying to setup a toolq when I can use the time to actually do something useful with that time.q

Reply

[-]

kmouratidis@reddit

I ran it in WSL as well, on my personal machine and my work laptop. The OpenAI-compatible thing could be better documented, but it's there. > If the required model does not exist in the list, in Settings under the LLM tab, you can toggle Advanced options and manually enter it with the correct prefix in the Custom Model text box. The Advanced options also allow you to specify a Base URL if required. https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/installation > For a full list of the providers and models available, please consult the litellm documentation. https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/llms Even more local stuff: https://docs.all-hands.dev/modules/usage/llms/local-llms

Reply

[-]

FullstackSensei@reddit

1. while I have WSL on my dev machine, I'm not going to use it to run this when my code lives on the Windows side. I know how to reach it, it's just additional, unnecessary friction. 2. Three different documentation pages for something that should be in a getting started page. Why do I and countless others have to waste so much time to get something up and running? 3. The whole point of the tool is to make my life easier. If it's a hassle to setup, why should I trust it won't be a hassle to use or do anything in besides the "happy flow" the developers thought of? For the record, I did figure how to set URL last night, and it still didn't work. I don't know why, and couldn't be bothered anymore to put in any time to figure that out. I have way more things to do with my time than to waste hours getting yet another AI tool running. There's an ocean of other tools that do 99% the same, and they're all using the same models.

Reply

[-]

Specialist_Cup968@reddit

I also had to restart the docker container after this process for the config to take effect. Its a bit inconvenient but it can work

Reply

[-]

HilLiedTroopsDied@reddit

you tried longer than me. but I was presenting the docker container from Unraid, skill issue, I lasted 15 minutes. I refused on my own merit to continue and just run the docker command locally when I have an expensive home server :P

Reply

[-]

voplica@reddit

OpenHands is really awesome and works quite well. However, for now you would need to setup the whole virtual machine if you want to run it on your host without giving privileged permission to the docker container. That’s because their docker container spins up another docker container and this type of functionality requires developers to give privileged permission or mount docker sockets (basically has the same problem if security vulnerability is found). This prevents developers in many companies from using OpenHands when they can’t use privileged containers easily, and setting up the whole virtual machine is a bit of overkill when you can spin up Docker-based Code Server with RooCode plugin without adding extra capabilities to a docker container. I believe at some point they will move to docker compose to spin up multiple Docker containers instead of using Docker inside Docker and this will simplify running OpenHands for broader community.

Reply

[-]

evilbarron2@reddit

I installed it for a fairly complex project. It’s a bit fiddly on setup, especially if you want to connect to local models, but it’s blown me away in how capable it is so far. Managed a tricky dependency upgrade in my forked library flawlessly as near as I can tell. First time that’s happened with any LLM tool I’ve used.

Reply

[-]

Rybens92@reddit

I personally think that OpenHands is best alternative to proprietary ai coding solutions. If you don't like paying as you go, you can use [Chutes.ai](http://Chutes.ai) subscriptions - 10$ and 20$ options with above 2000 request per day (!). I use it personally.

Reply

[-]

evilbarron2@reddit

Hadn’t seen chutes.ai before, it looks interesting. Currently using moonshot, love the pricing but becoming increasingly frustrated with Kimi’s limitations. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your openhands usage like, how much does chutes.ai cost you, and which is your favorite model? Is chutes a hassle to set up?

Reply

[-]

Rybens92@reddit

I pay 10$ for chutes because I don't need more than 2000 requests per day. I am just building my GitHub profile (all of repos are private for now) Now I am testing the newest deepseek 3.1 and it's really good even when benchmarks aren't saying that. But I still didn't get to know how to turn on the reasoning through the API 😅 Also others have tested many providers for example bigger qwen3 coder and chutes is one of the best providers if we are talking about performance of the model (I don't mean speed, but it's also good), so there almost none downsides except it probably won't last forever, because it's based on some crypto. So when crypto is doing good, chutes are also doing good.

Reply

[-]

popiazaza@reddit

Don't you see all the Devin and Manus hype? There are people working on open source alternative since the very beginning. Devin > OpenDevin > OpenHands Manus > OpenManus If you missed all the news, it's pretty much on you. It's a new AI agent category called SWE agent, instead of just coding agent. Everyone is on the SWE agent train.

Reply

[-]

wiski-bandana@reddit

are you even in the right thread

Reply

[-]

NeiroNext@reddit

I decided to check the product and have been sitting with the settings for the whole day. Installing docker and running it is not a problem, but no matter how hard I try, it does not want to connect to the local model, although in the console via curl the connection to it goes. Plus I created a 10 GB container, this is quite a lot, I do not understand why it requires such a crazy size, this is almost the size of the entire operating system.

Reply

[-]

trycrmr@reddit

I had a similar experience today. Running both LM studio and Open hands with more permissive networking settings allowed open hands to reach the LM studio web server. I was running it on a private network. The only stuff on that network is stuff I run myself, so wrt security, :shrug:. So maybe give that a try? IIRC it's add --host to the docker run arguments and for LM studio it was update the setting to run the web server so it doesn't only resolve over localhost, and instead broadcasts over the machine IP.

Reply

[-]

Trojblue@reddit

Too many undocumented things for a shittier version of cursor really, and since it's bring your own model the monthly cost will be HIGHER than cursor.

Reply

[-]

Haldt@reddit

I also discovered it quite recently and I’m totally impressed. I think it’s a huge shift in software development. Now you can even work on your mobile or iPad. I really like that I can self-host it and use it with a custom LLM but as you can also just pay credits to use it directly on their site (there are even a few free credits for testing) I don’t understand the complains about a complicated setup. You probably just use the free credits and pass it credentials for a server to set it up for you

Reply

[-]

BatmanTDK@reddit

OpenHands is a cool project, but the docs kind of suck. This can tank a project as much as anything.

Reply

[-]

Repulsive-Memory-298@reddit

I've used openhands a ton, starting back in November when we were seeing the first real agents and OpenHands was at the top of SweBench with room to breathe. Their lead didn't last long, but afaik no other os comes close. One thing to note is that many coding agents are not even benchmarked, eg. cursor (last time I checked), so it's not as good of a basis as it should be. I've made several reddit posts along the same lines as yours (And found hardly any mention of it anywhere else). Anyways, it's pretty good. I would say that they had a head start (which positioned them well for collecting data and training models like devestral) but they don't have a huge edge anymore. IMO as external tooling has gotten drastically better for LLM apps over the last few months, Openhands is pretty bloated for local use by comparison. Really though that depends on your use case. It's really cool that they're fully OS, including their code for Openhands as a cloud service, and it's not bloated in that context. Its also very easy to customize, they have strong conventions for agents/microagents

Reply

[-]

illusionst@reddit

I tried it and I don’t plan on changing my editor (VS Code). This should have been a VS Code extension or a fork.

Reply

[-]

createthiscom@reddit

Oh, another reason why Open Hands is great: It runs under docker, so you gain the ability to isolate what it can modify using docker mounts. I really like this feature for security and to keep the AI from fucking with things I didn't want it to touch.

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

There is a reason it is called open hands :-)

Reply

[-]

createthiscom@reddit

I don't use VS Code, that's why I like it. I think they're just pandering to IDE junkies with the VS Code thing.

Reply

[-]

Beach879@reddit

definitely check out this guide if you're trying to figure out which models to use for coding, especially if you care about price or free options: https://wuu73.org/blog/guide.html

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

Cool post. Thank you for sharing. How do you use Github Copilot with Cline though?

Reply

[-]

Beach879@reddit

there is a provider in the Cline drop down menu for when you choose which API to use, and one of them is for VS Code but i forgot what it is called, maybe VS Code API or something like that. Some of the models they won't let you use, like the newer Claude 3.7, probably 4 (haven't tried lol but I am guessing it will be blocked). But unlimited GPT 4.1... which is just fine because I use the expensive models for mainly planning, fixing bugs, doing the difficult stuff, and then GPT 4.1 can code/do the things the more expensive models say to do. It works out really good. I can still use Claude 4 or 3.7 in Copilot chat or even agent mode etc but really Cline kicks its ass for everything. But its still there to use. Honestly Copilot would not even be worth it if not for Cline because without Cline it is sloooooow as hell

Reply

[-]

Flashy-Lettuce6710@reddit

Just to confirm, for every new feature or bug I want to work on I usually make a new convo to keep the context length short. In OpenHands a new convo is like a new instance so this requires pulling the repo, reinstalling dependencies, etc. which also eats up a ton of context window. Is there a way to have multiple convos on the same codebase without having to reinstall everything each convo? Or does it not matter that I start new convos and I can just keep requesting more and more things in the same convo?

Reply

[-]

das_rdsm@reddit

Been using it for a long time now, it is a great tool , that deliver great results.

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

Would be interested in your use cases, how have you been using it and how has it been different to Roo? I only have experience with Roo and Cline so far, and are interested how it works differently.

Reply

[-]

das_rdsm@reddit

I use it in a fully autonomous manner deployed for multiple users, you can leverage the headless mode of Openhands for that. certainly not even close to something that roo or cline offer :) Openhands is much more versatile, and is truly a fully featured SWE-Agent that you can control to many different tasks and workflows, so very different of some others task specific stuff... You can even use openhands for non software related tasks, I use it basically as a ReAct (The AI concept, not the frontend framework) agent, so it does multiple generic tasks on top of also being a AI SWE Agent.

Reply

[-]

Pedalnomica@reddit

They used to be Open Devin. I think they started after Devin made a bit of a splash.

Reply

[-]

Sad_Bandicoot_6925@reddit

Its hard to try out. Thats the main issue. And they don't have a big brand name to get the visibility in. We run a similar service - NonBioS.ai - and you can get started in minutes - but the lack of big name branding still hurts.

Reply

[-]

lorddumpy@reddit

> We run a similar service Where is your github repository so I can deploy it myself? I don't see anything about local installs, just a pricing page

Reply

[-]

Leflakk@reddit

Not a dev here but tested and looks nice. Tbh, if I have to choose now I'd prefer something like Roo code (integrated in vscode and not "github" focused). But if OpenHands becomes "specialized" on open weight models but constantly find ways to "enhance" the possibilities with these models (which are always limited compared to closed) then I would keep it as my wife. I keep thinking that functionalities, modes, workflows could help for that.

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

Agree 100%

Reply

[-]

LoSboccacc@reddit

Deploying the thing is very annoying compared to a click and use cursor or roo code and the pay per use model is a bit of a limit compared to first party solutions as codex or claude code.

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

Pay per use? Openhands is 100% open source. You can host it on your own server. You also have a docker option. Everything that was developed for the cloud version is also available in the repo free to use.

Reply

[-]

LoSboccacc@reddit

But you play per token of the backend with cursor it's all wrapped up in the monthly fee Unless you use local models as well but that wasn't really possible until very recently, and it's slow.

Reply

[-]

das_rdsm@reddit

people can now use the agent mode with local models in cursor? can't believe they finally stopped trying to protect their system prompts.

Reply

[-]

psychonucks@reddit

Yeah this is huge if we can use Cursor's battletested software and prompt system with local models. There are some apply models other than theirs as well that can be used, like Morph. It's got to happen, I don't really see Cursor staying relevant past another 1-2 years if they don't expand to local use, which is going to grow massively. The local models aren't gonna stop improving.

Reply

[-]

Orolol@reddit

But Cursor obfuscate the context that it sends to the model, so you when you need more Thant 30k context, you never really know the quality of the information the model receive. This is the problem with the business model of Cursor. Because they're billed per token, but get paid a fixed amount per request, they've a strong incentive to crop your request the more they can.

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

Not necessarily. Until now I have been using OH + Gemini for free. But I'm heading to local inference, because of sensitive code.

Reply

[-]

neubig@reddit

Thanks u/LoSboccacc , dev here. We heard the feedback and are thinking about ways to resolve the issue. I created an issue here and we'll work on it: [https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands/issues/8632](https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands/issues/8632)

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

I think this is very much it

Reply

[-]

FullOf_Bad_Ideas@reddit

I think you can convince me (and others) to try it by showcasing an app build with it and Devstral - it would be a perfrect way to encourage others to try it. Otherwise, I will trust pair coding agents like Cline more - since llms aren't let run loose there, intuitively it should be easier to work with it as you can guide the llm along the way. >Also, do you think models specifically trained for a certain agent is the future? Absolutely. RL and SFT training for agent usecase is IMO extremely promising. The effort to make those finetunes is lower than I would have expected so far out of smaller teams - hobbyists and small companies should be able to make those finetunes on their own given that capable models are small to make it competitive price-wise.

Reply

[-]

neubig@reddit

Hey u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas , dev here. Thanks, this is a great idea! We'll try to do this.

Reply

[-]

oodelay@reddit

Shhhh big FBI/KGB secret

Reply

[-]

Aggravating-Agent438@reddit

just checked the swe bench, cortexa is top on verified list

Reply

[-]

ab2377@reddit

the ai open source projects getting tens of thousands of stars even is no guarantee that its not just hype and scam.

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

But take a look at the developer base, the PRs, etc. Not to mention that we have the author of the CodeActAgent paper in the team, working hard on improving OH's SWE Benchmark.

Reply

[-]

Mr_Moonsilver@reddit (OP)

Tru

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

OpenHands is the project/community I chose for my base AI tech months ago, after checking many other similar projects. Some of us are now using OpenHands to develop OpenHands. At some point I had it developing AI code on my smartphone (Termux + proot and OH connecting via SSH via CLI). The reason it has not been mentioned here is because the benchmarks for OH + ocal LLMs were not so good compared to cloud services. The OH team recently released an OH fine tuned LLM based on Qwen2.5 and now Mistral jumped in. And there is a good reason for their decision.

Reply

[-]

HornyGooner4401@reddit

It's more difficult to setup, and after downloading like 20GB of Docker images, you need to spend $ on Claude 3.7 tokens or whatever SOTA models to actually get good results because you're stuck with the limited web app. No thanks, My Hands™ is still more cost efficient than Open Hands, thought that might change with Devstral

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

Yes, it's a big and powerful project. You can use Gemini for free.

Reply

[-]

HornyGooner4401@reddit

Big? Yes. Powerful? That's a bit of a stretch. You're basically the assistant with how limited it is. Gemini Pro is free until you hit the rate limit, which you will with OpenHands. Unless you're recommending Flash models, which is terrible if you know actually know what you want to build

Reply

[-]

sammcj@reddit

It's neat, but I don't like the idea of having to give it root access to my servers docker socket, it also seems to often have issues with the runtime containers permissions, really it's just not as convenient as running Cline in my IDE.

Reply

[-]

kripper-de@reddit

It also runs in user mode. Some devs also created a OpenHands version that is running inside the Kaggle competition environment.

Reply

[-]

Lesser-than@reddit

I usually walk away, when docker is the how they present the preferred install method for local usage. Docker is not allowed on my machine period.

Reply

[-]

DeltaSqueezer@reddit

I'm the opposite, I try to dockerize tools that are not already dockerized to make them easy to deploy and isolate. With AI, you need some kind of way to manage version dependency hell. I much prefer docker to venvs.

Reply

[-]

Lesser-than@reddit

I get it, its handy I just figure if devs are ok with a bit of overhead from a vm they probably didnt spend much time optimizing its contents, at least thats been my experience.

Reply

[-]

Predatedtomcat@reddit

Just tried it for the first time, it works decently with devstral with ollama . Use Hostname:11434 and ollama/devstral:latest in settings page - took some time to figure this out. It seems to have vscode web version , Jupyter , app renderer , terminal and browser as well. Need not try other features other than code editor . Might be good for teams or remote as it runs on web. It has almost everything combined MCP , google AI colab, Once CUA kicks off locally this might come to top , only thing missing is CUA VNC to Linux or windows dockur container . Also i feel that every coder/local llamanian might need 5 things 1. Synchronous editor like roo code , cline (similar to non local ones like cursor , copilot , codex web , Gemini code assist , google colab) with MCP support 2. Asynchronous editor where it works in background without too much chat guidance , based on GitHub repos like aider ( non local ones like Claude code , codex , Jules , github copilot for PRs ) - headless based on GitHub comments/PRs and cli mode . 3. One shot app creator like (non-local ones like google ai studio , firebase studio , bolt , lovable etc) with canvas to see realtime - not aware of much local ones here 4. Sandbox support for dev and test ( Jules , codex web) without worrying about what it might do to your machine 5. Browser and a VNC to sandbox machine controller with CUA for automating almost anything . Open hands seems to hit first 4 of 5 , i feel like they are in right direction. Once browsing and VNC becomes main stream with multimodal capability it might be able to do manual and exploratory testing with mock data and solve issues much better . For now it should atleast do screen capture of browser , console logs and navigation using playwright MCP but needs not of manual intervention. Also With recent open sourcing of github copilot feels like things will get accelerated .

Reply

[-]

stoppableDissolution@reddit

> Also, do you think models specifically trained for a certain agent is the future? 1000% certain. Division of labor and specialization are, imo, inevitable.

Reply

[-]

magnus-m@reddit

I tried Open Devin and concluded it was not good enough for what I do, which is mostly adding features, fixing bugs and restructure projects for better performance and maintainability. Last week I tested openai's codex cli with o4-mini and came to the same conclusion. Even creating a new project from scratch, it starts to loose its understanding of the project and do stupid things to the point were it gets stock, creating bugs, breaking features and so on.

Reply

[-]

Sudden-Lingonberry-8@reddit

search on google,go to github, see docker guide.. time to put a lid on that software

Reply

[-]

spookperson@reddit

I've been playing with OpenHands since the LiveBench folks started testing SWE agent frameworks (OpenHands scores very well): https://liveswebench.ai/

Reply

[-]

popiazaza@reddit

Youtube and Reddit aren't the central of the world my dudes.

Reply

[-]

Nathamuni@reddit

I am seriously waiting for open jules how could that be if you can run it locally Dear open source committee is there any alternative for that

Reply

[-]

Lyuseefur@reddit

I was waiting for a good SWE model to come along. ByteDance just released one that looks really good. Going to try it soon with Open Hands

Reply

[-]

forgotten_pootis@reddit

which one ?

Reply

[-]

Lyuseefur@reddit

The SeedCoder Reasoning one https://huggingface.co/ByteDance-Seed/Seed-Coder-8B-Reasoning

Reply

[-]

MrWeirdoFace@reddit

Oddly enough I was JUST trying it out. It's REALLY good. At least with my usual blender python code tests. And it actually wanted to walk through each operator with me testing it one by one. So I played along, and it nailed it.

Reply

[-]

DAlmighty@reddit

It hasn’t been a great experience for me so far. I might have to keep at it.

Reply

[-]

fasti-au@reddit

Yes I think it’s fairly obvious specialising agents for task is key. I run 32b models for 99% of stuff with some oversight from big models where needed but I have tubing for 2 years. Tool calling didn’t exist when I was doing workarounds so I have been specialising I guess day one. I do t use unsloth for much as end of the day a model handoff is easier than rebuilding the wheel

Reply

[-]

Junior_Ad315@reddit

I've had it starred for a while and finally got around to trying it last week, and genuinely find it more elegant and capable than any of the other coding agent tools. It also doesn't have a massive prompt like all the other tools, just very well written bare bones instructions that seem to generalize well, which I appreciate. It supports MCP and is very customizable and you can configure your runtime. You can download trajectories for conversations which I imagine you could use to find tune it for your use case. I'm planning on setting it up so I can comment on issues or PRs and tell it to do things. Also it tops SWE bench, while none of the commercially available editors or extensions have benchmarks for actual agentic performance so it's hard to compare them objectively. Anyways I'm kind of a fan, it seems like a really well run/maintained project.

Reply

[-]

atineiatte@reddit

I also just learned about Open Hands today because of Devstral lol. Big fan already

Reply

[-]

one_tall_lamp@reddit

Good question i literally just found out about it today, had only heard a bit about it under its previous name like once a while back. Weird bc too and cline are mentioned nonstop on the forums and YT

Reply

Reply to Post

135 Comments