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New tools for building agents

openai.com

81–90 of 165 posts

Re: New tools for building agents

#81
post #4

swyx here. we got some preview and time with the API/DX team to ask FAQs about all the new APIs. https://latent.space/p/openai-agents-platform main fun part - since responses are stored for free by default now, how can we abuse the Responses API as a database :) other fun qtns that a HN crew might enjoy: - hparams for websearch - depth/breadth of search for making your own DIY Deep Research - now that OAI is offering…

for anyone that likes the Agents SDK, but doesn't want their framework attached to OpenAI, we're really liking PydanticAI[0]. 0 - https://ai.pydantic.dev/

Does it encode everything as json object, so special characters are getting escaped?

I’ve noticed that with longer responses (particularly involving latex), models are a lot less accurate when the results need to be additionally encoded into JSON.

I like structured, but my preference is yaml/markdown, as it is a lot more readable (and the only thing that works with longer responses, latex or code generation).

Re: New tools for building agents

#82
I feel like all those AI agent attempts are misguided at their core because they don't attempt to create new ways but replace humans on the legacy systems. This is fundamentally shortsighted because the economy, life and everything is about humans interacting with humans.

The current AI agent approach appears to be permutations of the joke about how people will make AI to expand their once sentence to a long nice e-mail and the AI on the receiving end will summarize that long e-mail into single sentence.

I get that there's a use case for automating tasks on legacy systems but IMHO the real opportunity is the opportunity to remove most of the legacy systems.

Humans are not that bad you know? Is it creating UIs for humans using AI then make AI use these UI to do stuff really the way forward?

Re: New tools for building agents

#83
post #67

Feels like OpenAI really want to compete with its own ecosystem. I guess they are doing this to try to position themselves as the standard web index that everyone uses, and the standard RAG service, etc. But they could just make great services and live in the infra layer instead of trying to squeeze everyone out at the application layer. Seems unnecessarily ecosystem-hostile

they target new entrants probably, they need more revenue, and more importantly a killer app that's at least a bit tied to them.

Re: New tools for building agents

#85
post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

“ These new tools streamline core agent logic, orchestration, and interactions, making it significantly easier for developers to get started with building agents”

Sounds exactly like “the cloud”, especially AWS. Basically “get married to our platform, build on top of it, and make it hard to leave.” The benefits are that it’s easy to get started. And also that they invested in the infrastructure, but now they are trying to lock you in by storing as much state and data as possible with them withoit an easy way to migrate. So, increase your switching costs. For social networks the benefit was that they had the network effect but that doesn’t apply here.

Re: New tools for building agents

#86
post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

I mirror this sentiment. Even their "function calling" abstraction still hallucinates parameters and schema, and the JSON schema itself is clearly way too verbose and breaks down completely if you feed it anything more complex than 5 very simple function calls. This just seems to build upon their already broken black box abstractions and isn't useful for any real world applications, but it's helpful for getting small proof-of-concept apps going, I guess...

Re: New tools for building agents

#87
post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

I mirror this sentiment. Even their "function calling" abstraction still hallucinates parameters and schema, and the JSON schema itself is clearly way too verbose and breaks down completely if you feed it anything more complex than 5 very simple function calls. This just seems to build upon their already broken black box abstractions and isn't useful for any real world applications, but it's helpful for getting small…

[deleted]

Re: New tools for building agents

#88
post #14

The Agents SDK they linked to comes up 404. BTW I have something somewhat similar to some of this like Responses and File Search in MindRoot by using the task API: https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot/blob/main/api.md Which could be combined with the query_kb tool from the mr_kb plugin (in my mr_kb repo) which is actually probably better than File Search because it allows searching multiple KBs. Anyway, if anyone wants…

sorry, fixed link: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/

Re: New tools for building agents

#89
post #62

I'm impressed by the advances in Computer Use mentioned here and this got me wondering - is this already mature enough to be utilized for usability testing? Would I be right to assume that in general, a UI that is more difficult for AI to navigate is likely to also be relatively difficult for humans, and that it's a signal that it should be simplified/improved in some way?

Why would you assume that? Modality of engagement is drastically different between the way LLM engages with UI vs human being

Oh, I had assumed that it was trained on human interaction data and should be generally similar, and from the examples I saw - it generally was (although still not as good as us). In what sense do you expect it to be drastically different?
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