US Mobile is a fast-growing wireless telecom provider, known for its first-of-its-kind tech that enables consumers to switch between any of the big three mobile networks. Priding itself on innovation, customer-centricity, and flexibility, US Mobile has leveraged technology since its founding to stay ahead of customer needs and differentiate itself.

Like many forward-thinking organizations, US Mobile made the strategic decision to embrace new AI initiatives across the organization and R&D teams.

Use case: Using OpenHands to expand an internal development platform

Delivering a great digital experience starts with building a strong engineering culture and technical foundation. US Mobile embodies this and has embraced modern DevOps best practices – such as utilizing internal developer platforms – to unlock developer productivity and self-service.

Recently, a senior engineer at US Mobile saw a unique opportunity to build an internal tool to automate infrastructure migration. Ultimately, building this tool in the internal developer platform would enable other developers to get self-service access.

To implement this, the engineer was empowered to use OpenHands to build and ship the feature end-to-end. They started the process by delegating a feature spec they had already written to OpenHands as a prompt. OpenHands was able to work on the task asynchronously in the background and generate the necessary backend and frontend code changes fully compatible with the developer platform's architecture.

This approach freed up the engineer to work on other assignments, while OpenHands managed to address nearly 80% of the development effort. Once the code branch was pushed, only minor adjustments were needed to address small edge cases.

"I'm finding that OpenHands is incredibly decisive. [Other solutions] spin its wheels and go in circles… whereas OpenHands did not do that, which I appreciate. It's very decisive and focused." – Senior Software Engineer, US Mobile

Looking ahead, the senior engineer sees opportunities to integrate OpenHands into their daily routine. For example, they can review upcoming tickets, and select one or two internal tooling requests with clearly defined solutions. Instead of manually implementing the feature, they can now draft a prompt describing the required change and assign it to OpenHands.

In this world, everyone wins - the engineer gets more done, and customers get new features and experiences faster.

"So the way I've been using it: I'll take one of those big tickets I have in the backlog, and I'll give it the prompt, and I'll just let OpenHands do a bulk of the work. It usually finishes within 5 to 10 minutes." – Senior Software Engineer, US Mobile

Results

Speed to resolution: An 8 point user story shrunk to 2 points

"The agent finished a majority of the task in 15 minutes and I spent another hour or so setting up and testing the changes. It took an 8 pointer story down to a 2 pointer." – Senior Software Engineer, US Mobile

Reclaimed time: Reducing manual coding work by 80%

"OpenHands does 80% of the work…. what could take a week of work, OpenHands did in about 5 minutes." – Senior Software Engineer, US Mobile

Looking Ahead

Going forward, US Mobile sees opportunities to use OpenHands on Bitbucket Pull Requests and on Linear tickets - providing developers at the company with a new means of embracing AI into their daily workflow.