The use of AI in software engineering has evolved over the past two years. It started as autocomplete, then went to a copilot in an IDE, and in the fast few months has evolved to be a long running, more end-to-end agent that run asynchronously in the cloud.
We believe that all agents will long more like this in the future - long running, asynchronous, more autonomous. Specifically, we think that they will:
Run asynchronously in the cloud
Integrate directly with your tooling
Have enough context over your environment to properly plan tasks over longer time horizons
Review their own work (and fix any issues) before completing their task
Over the past few months it became apparent that software engineering was the first discipline where this vision would become a reality. Yet there was no open source project that captured these characteristics.
So we built Open SWE, the first open-source, async, cloud-hosted coding agent. It connects directly to your GitHub repositories, allowing you to delegate tasks from GitHub issues or our custom UI. Open SWE operates like another engineer on your team: it can research a codebase, create a detailed execution plan, write code, run tests, review its own work for errors, and open a pull request when it's finished.
Open SWE contributions to the LangGraph repository
We've been using it internally to accelerate our own development on projects like LangGraph, and the Open SWE repo itself where it’s already a top contributor.
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