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Overview

The Agent settings page controls how the OpenHands agent behaves during conversations — from enabling sub-agents to choosing a different agent entirely. Navigate to Settings > Agent to configure these options.

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Sub-Agent Support

The OpenHands agent supports spawning sub-agents to handle parallel or delegated work within a single conversation. When sub-agent support is enabled, the agent can create child agents directly inside the main conversation thread, delegating subtasks to them without leaving the current context. Enabling this setting adds the task tool to the agent’s tool set, which it uses to spawn and coordinate sub-agents. Sub-agents share the same conversation thread, so their results surface inline alongside the main agent’s output.
Sub-agent support is available on the built-in OpenHands agent. ACP agents manage their own execution model and are not affected by this setting.

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Choosing a Different Agent

The Agent settings page is also where you switch from the built-in OpenHands agent to an external ACP agent — such as Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini CLI. ACP agents run as subprocesses managed by the Agent Server and use the Agent Client Protocol to communicate with Agent Canvas. This lets you bring your own preferred coding agent while keeping the full Agent Canvas experience — conversation history, backend management, secrets, and more. For step-by-step instructions on onboarding and configuring an ACP agent, see the ACP Agents guide.