[rchowe]

I played with OpenHands for a few days (using gpt-4o since I already had an OpenAI account). I found it to be decent at writing new code, but then it had a hard time making changes when there was a lot of repetitive code (in a TypeScript / React project that I had it create with vite).

One of the interesting things about OpenHands is that you can see what the AI is doing in the terminal window where you launched it. Since it can't really load the whole codebase into its context window, it does a lot of greping files, showing 10 lines on either side of the match, and then doing a search and replace based on this. This is pretty similar to what a human might do: attempt to identify the relevant function and change it.

I think I might have better luck with a simpler project, e.g. a Sinatra or Flask app where each route is relatively self-contained. I might give it or Cursor another try in the future when the tech has progressed a bit.