Curious what people think about the CUA API pricing? Any thoughts on what use cases it may or may not work for (the pricing specifically)?
New tools for building agents
101–110 of 165 posts
Re: New tools for building agents
#102There's a really good thread on Twitter from the designer of the new APIs going into the background behind many of the design decisions: https://twitter.com/athyuttamre/status/1899541471532867821 Here's the alternative link for people who aren't signed in to Twitter: https://nitter.net/athyuttamre/status/1899541471532867821
Re: New tools for building agents
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have experience with MCP? If yes, what do you think of it?
not OP but giving Claude access to local files / emails / database / terminal was … futuristic! (until I hit their stupid request limit)
I have been using Windsurf+Sonnet for a couple months, and recently adding Supabase MCP was a total game changer for velocity. I can't believe I waited so long to configure that.
Querying schema from prompt is great, but also being able to say "I cannot see the Create Project button on the projects list screen. Use MCP to see if user with email me@domain.com has the appropriate permissions" is just amazing.
Re: New tools for building agents
#104I 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.…
This bit feels like we are being pushed away from the existing API for non-technical reasons? > When using Chat Completions, the model always retrieves information from the web before responding to your query. To use web_search_preview as a tool that models like gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini invoke only when necessary, switch to using the Responses API. Porting over to the new Responses API is non-trivial, and we already ha…
I can’t find that text in the announcement. In fact it sounds like you have to use a specific model with the chat completions endpoint to get web searches.
Re: New tools for building agents
#105Nice to finally see one of the labs throwing weight behind a much needed simple abstraction. It's clear they learned from the incumbents (langchain et al)-- don't sell complexity. Also very nice of them to include extensible tracing. The AgentOps integration is a nice touch to getting behind the scenes to understand how handoffs and tool calls are triggered
why agentops specifically? doesnt the oai first party one also do it?
The OpenAI dash is great but is clearly missing a lot of features (i.e. data export, alerts, non-oai model compatibility). Believe it or not, but they don't even report response API costs on spans
Re: New tools for building agents
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
DeepSeek doesn’t seem to support it either FWIW. Maybe MCP is just an Anthropic thing.
It is not only an Anthropic thing, and it works with any model that supports function calling, which DeepSeek did not when it first launched. That probably has changed since, but I haven't looked!
I don't like it. I don't like the OpenAI API all that much either but at least it's lightweight. I think MCP would fit better on mcp.anthropic.com to go along with their email address mcp-support@anthropic.com at the bottom of https://modelcontextprotocol.io/
I wish they'd done a smaller launch of it and gather feedback rather than announcing a supposed new standard which feels a lot like a wrapper.
This here is atrocious https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/quickstart-resources... It includes this mcp PyPI package which pulls in a bunch of other PyPI dependencies. And for some reason they say "we recommend uv". How is that related to just setting up a tool for an AI to use?
Compare that to this get weather example: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/function_calling/
It makes me not want to use Claude/Anthropic.
Re: New tools for building agents
#107I 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.…
Exactly. You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API. LLMs are going to be become commodities, and this is OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise.
If you built on the Assistant API, maybe take the hint and don't just rewrite to the Responses API? Own your product, black box the LLM-of-the-day.
Re: New tools for building agents
#108A bit off topic but the post comes handy: can we settle the debate what an agent really is? It seems like everyone has their own definition. Ok I’ll start: an agent is a computer program that utilized LLMs heutiger for decision making.
There is already a definition in agent oriented programning. It has something to do with own sensors of environment and react autonomously. I find that definition fits agentic AI too. My rudimentary interpretation is anything with its own inner (event) loop.
Re: New tools for building agents
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
This bit feels like we are being pushed away from the existing API for non-technical reasons? > When using Chat Completions, the model always retrieves information from the web before responding to your query. To use web_search_preview as a tool that models like gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini invoke only when necessary, switch to using the Responses API. Porting over to the new Responses API is non-trivial, and we already ha…
I can’t find that text in the announcement. In fact it sounds like you have to use a specific model with the chat completions endpoint to get web searches.
In the API they are named like "gpt-4o-search-preview".
Re: New tools for building agents
#110I 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 tryi…
All of AWS' big money makers are the meat-and-potatoes services around compute, storage, databases etc. where you could drop their offering and replace it with another in a straightforward way. It will cost you to migrate in terms of time and direct spend (those egress fees...), but it's possible. Companies ultimately stay put because the products work and the price is reasonable, but if they tried to 10X the price overnight everyone would eventually bolt.
Yeah they keep pushing higher-level services, but the uptake of these is extremely limited. If you used something like SageMaker, which has an extremely high lock-in factor, it's probably because you're an old school company that don't know what you're doing and AWS held your developer's hand to get the Hello World-level app working, but at least you got your name printed in their case study materials of the project at the end.
I think OpenAI looks at AWS and thinks they can do better. And for their investors, they must do better. But in the end I think the commoditization of LLMs is already almost complete, and this is just a futile attempt to fight it.