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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03690 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03690/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 7 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12983/) (2023)
- [OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16741/) (2024)
- [SWT-Bench: Testing and Validating Real-World Bug-Fixes with Code Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12952/) (2024)
- [Commit0: Library Generation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01769/) (2024)
- [Coding Agents with Multimodal Browsing are Generalist Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03011/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08224/) (2026)
- [Code as Agent Harness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18747/) (2026)
- [SWE-World: Building Software Engineering Agents in Docker-Free Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03419/) (2026)
- [From Static Templates to Dynamic Runtime Graphs: A Survey of Workflow Optimization for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22386/) (2026)
- [CLI-Gym: Scalable CLI Task Generation via Agentic Environment Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10999/) (2026)
- [SWE-Master: Unleashing the Potential of Software Engineering Agents via Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03411/) (2026)
- [Immersion in the GitHub Universe: Scaling Coding Agents to Mastery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09892/) (2026)
- [BeyondSWE: Can Current Code Agent Survive Beyond Single-Repo Bug Fixing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03194/) (2026)
- [Quantifying Frontier LLM Capabilities for Container Sandbox Escape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02277/) (2026)
- [Temporary Authority, Permanent Effects: Commit-Time Authorization for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10487/) (2026)
- [Effective Strategies for Asynchronous Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21489/) (2026)
- [LOCA-bench: Benchmarking Language Agents Under Controllable and Extreme Context Growth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07962/) (2026)
- [The Scaffold Effect in Coding Agents: Harness Choice as a Hidden Variable in Coding-Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22585/) (2026)
- [SkCC: Portable and Secure Skill Compilation for Cross-Framework LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03353/) (2026)
- [Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12191/) (2026)
- [EvoMaster: A Foundational Evolving Agent Framework for Agentic Science at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17406/) (2026)
- [Dialogue SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Dialogue-Driven Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13995/) (2026)
- [Better Harnesses, Smaller Models: Building 90% Cheaper Agents via Automated Harness Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08938/) (2026)
- [On the limits and opportunities of AI reviewers: Reviewing the reviews of Nature-family papers with 45 expert scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20668/) (2026)
- [From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14502/) (2026)
- [CodeDelegator: Mitigating Context Pollution via Role Separation in Code-as-Action Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14914/) (2026)
- [ContextWeaver: Selective and Dependency-Structured Memory Construction for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23069/) (2026)
- [Agentic Agile-V: From Vibe Coding to Verified Engineering in Software and Hardware Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20456/) (2026)
- [ToolSelf: Unifying Task Execution and Self-Reconfiguration via Tool-Driven Emergent Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07883/) (2026)
- [One Reflection Is Not Enough: Self-Correcting Autonomous Research via Multi-Hypothesis Failure Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31478/) (2026)
- [Measuring Harness-Induced Belief Divergence in Multi-Step LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04528/) (2026)
- [From Cognitive Architectures to Language Agents: A Mechanism-Level Review of Lineage, Convergence, and Migration Gaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23942/) (2026)
- [Deep Agentic Search for Repository-Level Code Question Answering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01507/) (2026)
- [RTPO: Reverse-Turn Policy Optimization for Stabilizing Agentic RL Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18682/) (2026)
- [Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20485/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.