# Cole Murray hands off the open-source OpenInspect background agent project

> Original title: In January, I pasted a blog post into a coding agent. Nine months later, OpenInspect is running in production at companies from 5 to 500+...

- Source: X search: AI open-source releases
- Published: 2026-10-30T18:45:19.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/wxxeyzhiar60q3wcaoelerm91
- Original: https://x.com/colemurray/status/2116240046424752331

## Summary

Cole Murray says he will step away from OpenInspect on November 1 and hand the MIT-licensed project to a group of maintainers in the open-inspect GitHub organization. He reports the project grew from one commit nine months earlier to production use at companies with 5 to 500+ engineers, with 3,400 GitHub stars and 1,900 merged PRs from 50+ contributors. He also describes challenges with differing harness designs and sandbox providers.

## Why it matters

The retrospective shows how an open-source background agent system spread inside companies, and which parts of the design proved durable and which proved hard.

## Post

In January, I pasted a blog post into a coding agent. Nine months later, OpenInspect is running in production at companies from 5 to 500+ engineers. 

It's time to hand it off. https://x.com/i/article/2116233023104704512