Background Agents, also known as Open-Inspect, is an open-source background coding agent system on GitHub with about 3,388 stars under the MIT license, actively developed in 2026. Inspired by Ramp’s internal Inspect tool, it lets AI agents work on software tasks in the background while you focus on other things, then come back with finished pull requests.
Each agent session runs in a full development environment with Node.js, Python, git, browser automation, and VS Code. You can start and follow work from almost anywhere: a web UI, Slack, GitHub pull requests, Linear issues, or webhooks. Sessions support multiplayer collaboration in real time, and pull requests are created with proper commit attribution to the person who prompted the agent. Beyond one-off tasks, the system runs scheduled automations on cron and event-driven automations triggered by GitHub events, Sentry alerts, and webhooks, and it can spawn parallel sub-tasks that work simultaneously in separate sandboxes. You choose the underlying model and harness, including Claude, OpenAI Codex, Grok, or OpenCode Zen. The security model is deliberately single-tenant: it is designed for trusted teams inside one organization, not multi-tenant isolation. Because the code is fully open, teams can also audit exactly how agents access repositories and credentials before rolling it out internally.
The system is free and open source under the MIT license to self-host, with a hosted service available through the project website for teams that prefer a managed option.
Background Agents is for engineering teams that want autonomous coding help for routine tasks, maintenance, and alert-driven fixes, without giving up open-source control of the platform.