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New tools for building agents

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Re: New tools for building agents

#141
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.…

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.

> You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API.

You have to be purposefully naive to be a cutting-edge tech entrepreneur in the first place. If you fully acknowledged every risk and roadblock ahead, you’d probably never start.

But that deliberate naiveté is exactly what’s required to launch a startup in VUCA-space. Outsized success comes from exploiting emerging complexities: betting despite ambiguity, adapting quickly on top of uncertainty, and turning volatility into advantage.

Re: New tools for building agents

#143
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Looking at all the „AI specialists” that popped up recently- I have feeling there is enough naivety out there for it to work.

Oh man, don’t look up “vibe coding”

Re: New tools for building agents

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 atro…

That example code on DeepSeek doesn't actually include the logic to call a weather API? It just puts a fake answer back in, and you've got to handle the process manually.

The pyproject.toml in the Model Context Protocol example is just showing the new, "best" way to distribute and install Python projects and dependencies. If you haven't used uv before, it makes working with Python projects substantially better.

The Model Context Protocol server lets the model autonomously use the tool and incorporate its result. It's a much cleaner (imo obviously) separation of tool definition and execution.

Re: New tools for building agents

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API. You have to be purposefully naive to be a cutting-edge tech entrepreneur in the first place. If you fully acknowledged every risk and roadblock ahead, you’d probably never start. But that deliberate naiveté is exactly what’s required to launch a startup in VUCA-space. Outsized success comes from exploiting emerging complexities: betting despi…

Recognising when something makes 0 business sense is an important skill for an entrepreneur.

Re: New tools for building agents

#146
post #143
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at all the „AI specialists” that popped up recently- I have feeling there is enough naivety out there for it to work.

Oh man, don’t look up “vibe coding”

Too late ;) I ran into 2 guys that were exactly bragging about „vibe coding” on meetups. I just nod ↕

Re: New tools for building agents

#147
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the sense that these sorts of tools are more for power users than for software engineers with production AI experience.

Every manager I see now who gave up or was not a good coder is now chomping at the bit to use these tools

Not true. It’s impossible to find talent with experience in major agent frameworks like smolagents, autogen/ag2, crewAI.

I wish that there were tons of managers desperate to learn how to use these tools. I’m not seeing it!

Re: New tools for building agents

#148
post #146
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, don’t look up “vibe coding”

Too late ;) I ran into 2 guys that were exactly bragging about „vibe coding” on meetups. I just nod ↕

It feels like I'm becoming way too old for all the new computer stuff. I spent 2 decades trying to use every language available to write reliable programs for everyone, and now the whole world is jumping in this black hole / black box controlled by a few big companies where the output is random and definitely not up to my own standards.

It's very sad because we were supposed to do better than those who came before us, but instead we're throwing everything in the trash for a so-called productivity that I don't think even exists out of the influencers' brains.

Re: New tools for building agents

#149
post #29

I wonder why they phased out Pydantic in structured output for the Responses API.

Hey there! This is Steve here from the OpenAI team–I worked on the Responses API. We have not removed this! It should still work just like before! Here's an example: https://github.com/openai/openai-python/blob/main/examples/r...

Hi Steve,

I based my assumption on the examples in the documentation[^1]. It is great that we can still use that.

1. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs?a...

Re: New tools for building agents

#150
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too late ;) I ran into 2 guys that were exactly bragging about „vibe coding” on meetups. I just nod ↕

It feels like I'm becoming way too old for all the new computer stuff. I spent 2 decades trying to use every language available to write reliable programs for everyone, and now the whole world is jumping in this black hole / black box controlled by a few big companies where the output is random and definitely not up to my own standards. It's very sad because we were supposed to do better than those who came before us…

Me too. That resonates really strongly with my feelings.

I’m hoping that most people aren’t full steam in AI.

I haven’t had any coworkers who just rely on AI… I have had some bosses who do tho…

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