What is background-agents?

Background Agents, also called Open-Inspect, is an open source system that lets a coding AI work on tasks in the background while you do something else. Instead of watching an AI type in your editor, you send it a task and it runs in its own sandboxed environment with access to Node.js, Python, git, and browser automation, then reports back or opens a pull request when it is done. You can start a session from several places: a web interface, Slack, a GitHub pull request comment, a Linear issue, or a webhook. Multiple people can join the same session at once, so a team can watch or steer an agent together in real time. When the agent finishes, it creates a pull request that is credited to the person who asked for the work, not a generic bot account. You can also set the agent to run on a schedule, such as a cron job, or to trigger automatically from a Sentry alert or an incoming webhook. For bigger jobs, the agent can break work into smaller pieces and run several of them at once in separate sandboxes. You can choose which AI model does the work, including Anthropic Claude, OpenAI Codex through a ChatGPT subscription, or OpenCode Zen. The project is built to run for a single organization rather than many separate customers. It uses one shared GitHub App installation to handle git operations like cloning and pushing code, and the README is explicit that it does not check whether an individual user is allowed to access a specific repository before starting a session. Pull requests made by users who sign in with GitHub use that user's own token, so they can only open PRs on repos they already have access to, but anyone who signs in another way falls back to the shared bot account. Because of this, the README recommends deploying it behind your organization's SSO or VPN, installing the GitHub App only on the specific repositories you want it to touch, and restricting who can sign in. Under the hood it runs on Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects for coordination, with separate packages handling the web client, sandbox runtime, Slack and GitHub integrations, and infrastructure adapters for providers like Modal, Daytona, and E2B.