At its finest, programming is a inventive endeavor, however on this age of shifting every thing left, a lot of a developer’s day is full of what All Palms AI co-founder and CEO Robert Brennan calls the “toil-oriented task” like writing unit exams, managing dependencies and holding documentation updated. AI, however, is probably not inventive, however it’s fairly good at precisely these routine duties.
All Palms AI, which introduced a $5 million seed funding spherical led by Menlo Ventures on Thursday, goals to construct model-agnostic open supply AI brokers that may deal with most of this toil and permit builders to focus extra of their time on doing what they do finest.
A number of months in the past, Cognition AI confirmed off Devin, an AI agent that would plan and execute advanced engineering duties — and. perhaps extra importantly, construct and deploy new purposes end-to-end.
“The Cognition folks came out with their Devin demo and I — and I think every other software engineer in the world — was amazed at that video,” Brennan mentioned in an interview forward of Thursday’s announcement. “I think it really catalyzed in our imagination what the future of development is going to look like, but also kind of scared us that it was being developed as closed source and that it was being kept in this walled garden we couldn’t see and contribute to and really own as a development community.”
This open supply venture, which began out as OpenDevin earlier this yr and is now referred to as OpenHands, began with a textual content file on GitHub and now has over 30,000 stars and greater than 150 contributors.
The concept is for the OpenHands agent to turn out to be a proactive pair programmer who works hand-in-hand with the developer and who can deal with a lot of the toil of a developer’s day-to-day work. Which will contain writing exams and deploying and software, but in addition recognizing {that a} change in a single file (perhaps the identify of a perform) would possibly affect how different components of the appliance perform and asking the developer if it ought to alter the affected recordsdata accordingly.
“AI is going to completely change how developers work. But it’s not going to change their preference for adopting open source, especially when it comes to technology that affects their day-to-day work,” mentioned Joff Redfern, a associate at Menlo Ventures and former chief product officer at Atlassian. “By building in the open, All Hands is helping the software engineering community work toward an ideal AI-powered development experience.”
Brennan and his two co-founders, Xingyao Wang (chief AI officer) and Graham Neubig (chief scientist), have intensive expertise in working in pure language processing and constructing brokers. Brennan beforehand labored on doc summarization at Google after which in govt roles at quite a few startups, engaged on machine studying and infrastructure initiatives. Neubig is an affiliate professor at Carnegie Mellon with intensive expertise in pure language processing; Wang is interrupting his doctorate program on the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the place he did analysis on interactive language brokers powered by basis fashions.
“None of us were surprised to see the Cognition demo in terms of technology,” Brennan mentioned. “We all knew that this was there, but seeing it all come together into a user experience really just excited us to start pushing on building that in the open.”
Brennan additionally famous that whereas instruments like Copilot are very useful for builders, they aren’t (but) targeted on your entire “agentic loop of writing code” akin to a self-driving automotive. That’s what All Palms AI is aiming for, even when this nonetheless stays considerably aspirational. It’s not such as you may give the agent entry to an organization’s complete JIRA backlog and let it free and attain each job in that. Certainly, Brennan — like most individuals within the business in the present day — thinks that there shall be a necessity for human builders within the loop for a really very long time.
There are additionally nonetheless unsolved questions round what the consumer/developer expertise for such a system ought to really appear like. All Palms AI does have a designer on workers, although, and it’s good to see it wanting into these questions early on. Proper now, the expertise can be nonetheless considerably decoupled from the event atmosphere, however the group plans to construct integrations with VS Code and different editors quickly.
As with many open supply startups, All Palms AI expects to monetize its service by providing paid, closed-source enterprise options. “We think that there’s a bunch of software that we can build that complements the open source that’s really delivering value to big enterprises where we can feel good about building that in a closed source way to help make sure that we have a sustainable open source project that’s getting financial contribution back from the larger enterprises that are using it,” Brennan mentioned.
With this primary funding spherical, although, the group plans to construct out its know-how stack earlier than it delves deeper into monetizing the service. Along with Menlo, which led this spherical, Pillar VC, Betaworks and Rise up additionally participated. The corporate additionally introduced on quite a few angels, together with Hugging Face co-founder Thom Wolf, Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher and PyTorch creator and Meta VP Soumith Chintala.
