In this VMblog Expert Interview, we sit down with Robert Brennan, CEO and Co-Founder of OpenHands, to talk about one of the most fast-moving stories in enterprise software development today — the rise of AI-powered coding agents and what it takes to run them at scale.

Robert shares the origin story behind OpenHands, which launched as an open-source project in March 2024, inspired by early agentic coding demos that showed a fully automated inner development loop for the first time. Since then, the project has grown to over 70,000 GitHub stars and 500-plus contributors, making it one of the most active open-source AI development communities in the world.

But the big news in this interview is the launch of OpenHands’ new Agentic Control Plane — a key component of their new enterprise commercial offering. Robert explains what it is, why it matters, and who it’s built for. Rather than having engineers manually trigger AI agents one task at a time, the control plane allows organizations to automate agents at scale — triggering them on schedules or in response to real-world events from platforms like GitHub, Slack, and Datadog. It also gives teams visibility into agent performance, cost tracking, and ROI measurement, with built-in feedback loops so agents improve over time.

Robert also breaks down how organizations should think about open source vs. the enterprise platform: the open-source version is ideal for individual developers running agents locally, while the commercial offering is designed for teams that need cloud scale, collaboration, and deep third-party integrations.

The conversation wraps up with a thoughtful take on the future of the human-AI relationship in software development. Robert’s view: engineers aren’t going away — they’re moving up the stack, from writing code to managing complex systems of agents. And with AI able to ship software faster than ever, the world is going to need more smart people overseeing those systems, not fewer.

Whether you’re a developer curious about agentic AI, an engineering leader evaluating tools, or just trying to understand where software development is headed, this is a conversation worth watching.