background-agents

Background-agents lets you fire off AI coding agents that work on their own. You hand one a task, it spins up a sandboxed dev environment, clones your repo, does the work, and opens a pull request while you do something else. It is the self-hosted, open source take on what Cursor's cloud agents and Devin sell as a subscription. MIT licensed.

Free to use is not free to run. This is a multi-service system: a Next.js web app, Cloudflare Workers, Python pieces, a GitHub App, and an account with a sandbox provider such as Modal, Daytona, Vercel Sandbox, OpenComputer or E2B. Models come through an Anthropic key or Claude subscription, a ChatGPT subscription for Codex, SuperGrok, or OpenCode Zen. The software is free; the sandbox and model bills are not.

Sessions start from the web UI, Slack, GitHub pull requests, Linear issues or webhooks, and it runs scheduled and event-driven automations. One person does most of the maintenance, so treat it as capable but young. Solo devs and small teams who want autonomous coding without a per-seat bill get the most from it. Teams that need reliability and support today should pay for a hosted product.

The catch is trust and ops. It is single-tenant by design: anyone whose role allows repository use can reach every repo the GitHub App is installed on, with no per-user access check. Add infrastructure you maintain and API bills you watch, and it only pays off if you value control over convenience.