Introducing Deputies: Self-Hosted Background Agents

Sid Palas launched Deputies, an open-source control plane for self-hosted background coding agents, enabling teams to run asynchronous software engineering tasks on remote infrastructure. The platform addresses gaps in existing solutions by offering flexible deployment options without vendor lock-in, supporting workflows triggered by issues, CI failures, or alerts.

What Is a Background Coding Agent? what-is-a-background-coding-agent By now, most people are familiar with the idea of a coding agent. It combines an LLM with a harness a fancy way of saying “while loop + tool access” to perform software engineering tasks. Tools like Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode exploded in popularity over the last year, but they are all primarily focused on individual, user-centric workflows. Running coding agents on individual developer machines is powerful, but applying that pattern to teams and organizations requires an additional leap. A background coding agent uses the same basic loop, but runs asynchronously on delegated work. Given a prompt, repo, environment, and context, it can inspect code, run tests, make changes, produce artifacts, and report back for review. The key shift is where that work runs: out of one developer’s local session and into a remote control plane. That changes the operating model in a few important ways: - Team visibility and collaboration become first-class, and workflow improvements can be applied across the entire team. - The full sequence of events from prompt to execution to output is captured and auditable. - Execution is not dependent on whether an individual developer machine is on or connected. - Concurrency is not limited by local compute resources. - Work can be triggered by issues, failed CI runs, alerts, dependency updates, or recurring jobs in addition to manual prompts. A Brief Timeline of Background Coding Agents a-brief-timeline-of-background-coding-agents This category has been explored by projects like Background Agents https://background-agents.com/ , and the broader space has moved quickly: | Date | Project | Signal | |---|---|---| | Mar 2024 | | OpenHands https://github.com/OpenHands/OpenHands Open SWE https://github.com/langchain-ai/open-swe Ona https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-is-now-ona Spotify Honk https://engineering.atspotify.com/2025/11/spotifys-background-coding-agent-part-1 Ramp Inspect https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-agent Open Inspect https://github.com/ColeMurray/background-agents Cursor self-driving codebases https://cursor.com/blog/self-driving-codebases OpenAI Codex harness https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/ Stripe minions https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents Deputies https://github.com/sidpalas/deputies Introducing Deputies introducing-deputies Deputies is an open-source control plane for self-hosted background coding agents. It can run on the server in your closet or in a giant EKS cluster on AWS. It is simple enough to get up and running in an hour, but provides the right primitives to build the workflows your team needs. See What a Deputies Session Looks Like see-what-a-deputies-session-looks-like Browse a read-only snapshot of real agent work: the original request, progress updates, diagnostics, artifacts, callbacks, and session context that Deputies keeps together while a background agent runs. Why Build Another Coding Agent Platform? why-build-another-coding-agent-platform As the timeline above shows, this space is moving quickly. From the conversations I am having, many software companies are either adopting a paid option or building some version of this internally. That raises the obvious question: “Sid, why build another?” Hosted commercial offerings such as Devin and Ona are impressive, but they can be expensive, opaque, and constrained by the integrations they choose to support. If your workflow is not covered, you are waiting on someone else’s roadmap. There are also high-quality open-source options, including Open Inspect and Open SWE. But after working with those systems, I became frustrated by their deployment constraints: Open Inspect is tightly tied to Cloudflare, and Open SWE heavily favors deploying to LangSmith. That is the gap I want Deputies to fill. Deployability is a core feature from day one, so teams can run background coding agents wherever the rest of their infrastructure already runs, without introducing a new deployment model. Why Self-Hosted and Open Source? why-self-hosted-and-open-source Why Self-Hosted? why-self-hosted Background agent systems are most useful when they have the right context: logs, traces, feature flags, CI results, internal docs, private packages, and service-specific tooling. Much of that context already lives behind the same trust boundary as the code. Self-hosting lets teams run agents inside that boundary and reuse existing access patterns with properly scoped credentials. One workflow might only need read-only access to observability tools; another might need permission to push a branch, use GitHub tooling to open a pull request, or report back to the system that triggered the work. There is also a cost argument. The models are expensive enough on their own, and self-hosting lets teams run the orchestration layer closer to cost instead of paying a premium on top of LLM usage. Why Open Source Matters why-open-source-matters Self-hosted infrastructure should be inspectable, not just deployable. Teams can audit the code and understand how sensitive information is handled, stored, and protected. They can also extend the system for internal workflows, custom integrations, and deployment patterns the default project does not support yet. Because of that, Deputies can become infrastructure that teams adapt to their environment, not a black box they route around. Deployment Options deployment-options | Control plane deployment | Agent sandbox provider | Best for | |---|---|---| | Kubernetes Agent Sandbox https://agent-sandbox.sigs.k8s.io/ Who Is Deputies For? who-is-deputies-for - Engineering teams that want shared visibility, history, review, and iteration around agent usage. - Platform teams that want to offer background-agent infrastructure internally instead of asking every team to build its own. - Companies with private repos, private networks, custom CI, internal tooling, or compliance requirements. - Teams that want background agents without routing the control plane and persisted product state through a hosted background-agent vendor. - Developers who want the benefits of background agents without building the orchestration layer from scratch or paying a markup around it. Try Deputies try-deputies If you want to try Deputies yourself, start with the deployment docs https://github.com/sidpalas/deputies/blob/main/docs/deployment.md in the repo. If you get stuck or want to talk through a deployment, email me at email protected /cdn-cgi/l/email-protection 56253f3216323320392625323f243335223f20337835393b or mention @sidpalas https://x.com/sidpalas on X. If you want to see a more detailed demo of the system, including using the Railway template to spin up a copy of Deputies in about a minute, watch the launch post on X: