Dex · October 23, 2026
\nWe've been saying for a few months now that software factories have to be open and composable. Every team we talk to is building their own out of compute, harnesses, and review flows they already have. The last thing great builders want is a black box sitting in the middle of their SDLC.
\nWe spent an hour on AI That Works on what the parts look like. David Crawshaw made the sharper version of the case in Devtools must be open source: once your agent can read and patch the source of every tool you use, closed source tools become frustrating because you can't fix them, you can't customize them, and you're kind of at the whims of the team building them.
\nSo today we're open sourcing HumanLayer core: github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer
\nThis is all the same code HumanLayer Cloud runs:
\nhumanlayer CLIEverything is licensed under Apache 2.0. If you build+run it yourself, there's no telemetry at all. Data is only sent if you set keys/DSNs etc.
\nIf you're a paid or free user of cloud-hosted HumanLayer, nothing changes for now, you can keep using it as you have been.
\nIf you want to run the whole stack yourself, you can probably get it up today using the docker compose file. Launch a coding agent and ask it to
\nwalk me through getting the devstack up and running
\nWorth noting that right now there are a lot of third party API keys that could be made optional, but are not yet (i.e. processes will refuse to start without them). This is one of the first things we'll be updating, so you don't have to go get keys for WorkOS, Slack, Linear, etc just to use the app.
\nI'm grateful that we have contributors lined up who are pretty excited to improve this, and in general to make the self-hosting story great. Issues are open if you want to join them. We're looking forward to supporting flexible deployment options to AWS / IAC / Kubernetes / etc soon.
\nBeing open source brings a whole new set of problems we haven't hit yet, from both a maintainer / triage perspective and from a security perspective (especially given events of this week), but we've spent a ton of time hardening the app, and we're confident this is the right way forward.
\nMore soon. Look forward to building with y'all.
\nDex and Kyle
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