An open-source reference app by Vercel for building and running background coding agents, featuring a decoupled Web–Agent–Sandbox architecture with persistent workflows, snapshot-based recovery, and GitHub integration.
Open Agents is an open-source coding agent reference app maintained by Vercel Labs, positioned as a "fork and adapt" scaffold template. The project adopts a three-tier decoupled architecture: the Web layer, built on Next.js, provides authentication, session management, and streaming UI; the Agent layer leverages the Vercel Workflow SDK for persistent multi-step execution decoupled from request lifecycles; the Sandbox layer, based on Vercel Sandbox, offers an isolated environment with filesystem, Shell, Git, and dev server capabilities, supporting snapshot-based hibernation and recovery.
The core architectural decision is the thorough decoupling of Agent and Sandbox—the Agent runs outside the VM and interacts with the Sandbox through tools such as read, write, bash, grep, glob, and fetch, enabling independent evolution of model selection and sandbox implementation. The project includes built-in GitHub integration (via GitHub App for installation-based repository access), supporting repository cloning, branch work, and optional automatic commit/push/PR creation. Additional capabilities include a skill system with sub-agents (e.g., built-in code-review skill), read-only session link sharing, and optional voice input.
The project is managed as a Turborepo monorepo, using TypeScript (99.3%), Bun as the package manager, and Ultracite (oxlint + oxfmt) for code quality. Deployment is tightly coupled to the Vercel platform, requiring a PostgreSQL database and Vercel OAuth configuration, with GitHub integration requiring additional GitHub App setup. Originally named "open-harness" and later renamed to "open-agents", no formal release tags have been published as of now. The official website open-agents.dev currently only displays Vercel AI SDK promotional text and appears to be a placeholder.