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At its good , programming is a creative endeavour , but in this old age of shifting everything give , much of a developer ’s day is satiate with whatAll Hands AIco - founder and CEO Robert Brennan forebode the “ labor - orient chore ” like writing unit tests , do dependencies and keeping documentation up to date . AI , on the other manus , may not be creative , but it is pretty good at on the dot those unremarkable tasks .
All Hands AI , which announced a $ 5 million seed financial backing round led by Menlo Ventures on Thursday , aims to progress exemplary - agnostic open source AI agents that can handle most of this toil and allow developer to focus more of their sentence on doing what they do well .
A few month ago , Cognition AIshowed off Devin , an AI agent that could contrive and execute complex engineering task — and . maybe more importantly , work up and deploy young lotion end - to - end .
“ The Cognition folks follow out with their Devin demo and I — and I cogitate every other computer software engineer in the world — was amazed at that picture , ” Brennan said in an interview ahead of Thursday ’s announcement . “ I think it really catalyse in our imagery what the future of growth is going to look like , but also kind of pock us that it was being developed as shut source and that it was being kept in this walled garden we could n’t see and contribute to and really own as a ontogeny community . ”
Thisopen source undertaking , which started out as OpenDevin earlier this year and is now call OpenHands , started with a text single file on GitHub and now has over 30,000 star and more than 150 contributors .
The melodic theme is for the OpenHands agent to become a proactive pair programmer who works hand - in - hand with the developer and who can care much of the labor of a developer ’s daylight - to - day body of work . That may involve writing tests and deploying and program program , but also recognize that a change in one file ( maybe the name of a function ) might influence how other parts of the program social occasion and asking the developer if it should adjust the affected files accordingly .
“ AI is break down to all switch how developers work out . But it ’s not survive to convert their preference for adopting candid seed , especially when it come up to engineering science that impact their day - to - day study , ” said Joff Redfern , a partner at Menlo Ventures and former chief product officer at Atlassian . “ By make in the opened , All Hands is help the software engineering science community work toward an idealistic AI - power developing experience . ”
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Brennan and his two Colorado - laminitis , Xingyao Wang(chief AI policeman ) andGraham Neubig(chief scientist ) , have extensive experience in working in natural language processing and building agent . Brennan antecedently worked on document summarization at Google and then in executive roles at a number of startups , working on car learning and base projects . Neubig is an associate prof at Carnegie Mellon with encompassing experience in innate language processing ; Wang is disrupt his doctorate computer programme at the University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign , where he did research on synergistic language agents power by foundation models .
“ None of us were surprised to see the Cognition demo in terms of technology , ” Brennan said . “ We all knew that this was there , but seeing it all come in together into a drug user experience really just excited us to depart push on building that in the surface . ”
Brennan also note that while tools like co-pilot are very helpful for developers , they are n’t ( yet ) sharpen on the intact “ agentic iteration of writing code ” consanguineal to a self - aim car . That ’s what All Hands AI is aim for , even if this still remain somewhat aspirational . It ’s not like you’re able to give the agent access to a company ’s intact JIRA backlog and let it loose and fulfil every job in that . Indeed , Brennan — like most people in the industry today — think that there will be a need for human developer in the loop for a very long time .
There are also still unsolved questions around what the user / developer experience for such a system should actually count like . All Hands AI does have a intriguer on staff , though , and it ’s good to see it looking into these questions early on . the right way now , the experience is also still somewhat dissociate from the development surround , but the team plans to construct integrating with VS Code and other editor in chief soon .
As with many undefended beginning startups , All Hands AI expects to monetize its religious service by offer paid , closed - source enterprise lineament . “ We recollect that there ’s a bunch of software that we can establish that complements the open source that ’s really deliver note value to giving initiative where we can sense good about building that in a closed source way to help oneself verify that we have a sustainable open source project that ’s make fiscal donation back from the larger enterprises that are using it , ” Brennan tell .
With this first funding round , though , the team plans to build out its technology stack before it cut into deeply into monetizing the military service . In addition to Menlo , which led this round , Pillar VC , Betaworks and Rebellion also participated . The troupe also brought on a number of holy man , include Hugging Face co - founder Thom Wolf , Cloudera co - founder Jeff Hammerbacher and PyTorch creator and Meta VP Soumith Chintala .
