In a recent talk, Ray Myers, Chief Architect at Open Hands, provided a deep dive into the Open Hands project, detailing its evolution, its upcoming V1 release, and the strategic pivot toward a modular Agent SDK. Ray framed Open Hands as “the leading open-source coding agent,” a project that began 18 months ago and has since developed a robust ecosystem.
Ray's point about agents needing to live beyond the IDE really resonates. The example of IntelliJ → GitLab → Playwright → Argo → Datadog perfectly captures how bespoke every company's workflow actually is. The SDK approach makes so much more sense than trying to build one-size-fits-all tooling. His TDD agent challenge is intresting - the fine-grained control to enforce actual test-first behavior (not just prompting for it) could finally make TDD agents practical. The Datadog integration example shows how the SDK can meet teams where they actually work. Curious to see if anyone tackles the Jupyter notebook culture clash he mentioned.
Ray's point about agents needing to live beyond the IDE really resonates. The example of IntelliJ → GitLab → Playwright → Argo → Datadog perfectly captures how bespoke every company's workflow actually is. The SDK approach makes so much more sense than trying to build one-size-fits-all tooling. His TDD agent challenge is intresting - the fine-grained control to enforce actual test-first behavior (not just prompting for it) could finally make TDD agents practical. The Datadog integration example shows how the SDK can meet teams where they actually work. Curious to see if anyone tackles the Jupyter notebook culture clash he mentioned.