Dex · October 23, 2026 · < 3 min read
We'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.
We 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.
So today we're open sourcing HumanLayer core: github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer
### what's inside
This is all the same code HumanLayer Cloud runs:
- the desktop app (Electron, plus a Tauri build) and the underlying web app that powers the UI
- the daemon that runs Claude Code and Codex sessions on your machines, shipped in the
humanlayerCLI - the cloud API, and the Electric proxy that syncs Postgres out to every client
- the build sources for the public humanlayer-pi andhumanlayer-opencode plugins
- the RPI skills and the Linear CLI
- the data model: orgs, teams, projects, tasks, sessions, plans and comments, diffs, PRs, and the GitHub / Linear / Jira / Slack integrations
Everything 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.
### for existing users
If you're a paid or free user of cloud-hosted HumanLayer, nothing changes for now, you can keep using it as you have been.
### running it yourself
If 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
walk me through getting the devstack up and running
Worth 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.
I'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.
### what's next
Being 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.
More soon. Look forward to building with y'all.
Dex and Kyle