The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Xingyao, Rosenberg, Simon, Michelini, Juan, Smith, Calvin, Tran, Hoang, Nyst, Engel, Malhotra, Rohit, Zhou, Xuhui, Chen, Valerie, Brennan, Robert, Neubig, Graham
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Xingyao
Rosenberg, Simon
Michelini, Juan
Smith, Calvin
Tran, Hoang
Nyst, Engel
Malhotra, Rohit
Zhou, Xuhui
Chen, Valerie
Brennan, Robert
Neubig, Graham
author_facet Wang, Xingyao
Rosenberg, Simon
Michelini, Juan
Smith, Calvin
Tran, Hoang
Nyst, Engel
Malhotra, Rohit
Zhou, Xuhui
Chen, Valerie
Brennan, Robert
Neubig, Graham
contents Agents are now used widely in the process of software development, but building production-ready software engineering agents is a complex task. Deploying software agents effectively requires flexibility in implementation and experimentation, reliable and secure execution, and interfaces for users to interact with agents. In this paper, we present the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, a toolkit for implementing software development agents that satisfy these desiderata. This toolkit is a complete architectural redesign of the agent components of the popular OpenHands framework for software development agents. To achieve flexibility, we design a simple interface for implementing agents that requires only a few lines of code in the default case, but is easily extensible to more complex full-featured agents with features such as custom tools, memory management, and more. For security and reliability, it delivers seamless local-to-remote execution portability, integrated REST/WebSocket services. For interaction with human users, it can connect directly to a variety of interfaces, such as visual workspaces (VSCode, VNC, browser), command-line interfaces, and APIs. Compared with existing SDKs from OpenAI, Claude and Google, OpenHands uniquely integrates native sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, and built-in security analysis. We validate the architecture empirically: production deployment data shows that V1 substantially reduces system-attributable failures over V0 with negligible event-sourcing overhead, and evaluations across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate strong agent performance. Put together, these elements allow the OpenHands Software Agent SDK to provide a practical foundation for prototyping, unlocking new classes of custom applications, and reliably deploying agents at scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03690
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents
Wang, Xingyao
Rosenberg, Simon
Michelini, Juan
Smith, Calvin
Tran, Hoang
Nyst, Engel
Malhotra, Rohit
Zhou, Xuhui
Chen, Valerie
Brennan, Robert
Neubig, Graham
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Agents are now used widely in the process of software development, but building production-ready software engineering agents is a complex task. Deploying software agents effectively requires flexibility in implementation and experimentation, reliable and secure execution, and interfaces for users to interact with agents. In this paper, we present the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, a toolkit for implementing software development agents that satisfy these desiderata. This toolkit is a complete architectural redesign of the agent components of the popular OpenHands framework for software development agents. To achieve flexibility, we design a simple interface for implementing agents that requires only a few lines of code in the default case, but is easily extensible to more complex full-featured agents with features such as custom tools, memory management, and more. For security and reliability, it delivers seamless local-to-remote execution portability, integrated REST/WebSocket services. For interaction with human users, it can connect directly to a variety of interfaces, such as visual workspaces (VSCode, VNC, browser), command-line interfaces, and APIs. Compared with existing SDKs from OpenAI, Claude and Google, OpenHands uniquely integrates native sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, and built-in security analysis. We validate the architecture empirically: production deployment data shows that V1 substantially reduces system-attributable failures over V0 with negligible event-sourcing overhead, and evaluations across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate strong agent performance. Put together, these elements allow the OpenHands Software Agent SDK to provide a practical foundation for prototyping, unlocking new classes of custom applications, and reliably deploying agents at scale.
title The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03690