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OpenAI Agents API

developers.openai.com

51–60 of 202 posts

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#51
post #43

I think we’re still figuring out the right abstraction for offering agents as a product. - LLMs are a great foundation but building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole. - There are harnesses available as open source libraries but that’s still coupled to an environment. Where does the state persist? Like maybe I’m a Cloudflare worker and don’t even have a file system. Agent as a service like thi…

I just have a slack bot running on a VM that sees a message and invokes pi. It would be trivial for every request to clone a full lxd container and have all the tools and repos required if I wanted to allow it to do even more. Not sure why anyone prefers to choose locked in options

> Not sure why anyone prefers to choose locked in options

Convenience. And OPEX vs CAPEX something something.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#52

I think we’re still figuring out the right abstraction for offering agents as a product. - LLMs are a great foundation but building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole. - There are harnesses available as open source libraries but that’s still coupled to an environment. Where does the state persist? Like maybe I’m a Cloudflare worker and don’t even have a file system. Agent as a service like thi…

There might not be a good abstraction. I've built a few harnesses for different types of workflows, and the details are so different I struggle to see a good abstraction. It's also not clear there should be - if you look at most complex software systems, it's a collection of smaller abstractions/tools/systems pulled together to achieve X.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#55
post #3

What I want (which I don’t think exists?) is a way to trigger turns that the user can monitor in the codex application. I.e., when event X happens, my application triggers Codex to take a turn with input Y, which the user can monitor through codex. Right now the only way to get close to this is with polling or essentially rewriting a codex-like frontend.

do you mean like a cloud agent provider? What we're working on at noriagentic.com may be relevant -- you can fire events from slack/web/cli to kick off an agent in a box and talk to it as if it was running local

Do you guys support projects that span multiple repositories? (and can create multiple PRs across them?)

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#56

I think we’re still figuring out the right abstraction for offering agents as a product. - LLMs are a great foundation but building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole. - There are harnesses available as open source libraries but that’s still coupled to an environment. Where does the state persist? Like maybe I’m a Cloudflare worker and don’t even have a file system. Agent as a service like thi…

I think the abstraction is only part of the problem. The other part is that all these companies offering ai products are deeply untrustworthy, and I don’t want to let them any further into my stack than I have to. Claude code and codex are great because they are lightweight, and operate on top of the rest of my tools with little to no change needed, so they can be eliminated or migrated away from with zero cost. They…

Just letting you know, this comment inspired me to finally just say "screw it" and launch what I've been building for the past year. https://www.cadenya.com

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#57

I think we’re still figuring out the right abstraction for offering agents as a product. - LLMs are a great foundation but building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole. - There are harnesses available as open source libraries but that’s still coupled to an environment. Where does the state persist? Like maybe I’m a Cloudflare worker and don’t even have a file system. Agent as a service like thi…

> Where does the state persist?

Spider men meme of developers pointing at each other thinking "Not it".

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#58
It's interesting to me that the agents comparison page[0] doesn't list codex's app-server as an option.

I've found the app-server to be the most flexible, compared to the raw Responses API or Agents SDK.

Certainly seems like everyone is still figuring out the right interface here.

Also of note, since GPT-5.5 or so, Codex doesn't even use the Responses API as intended, but instead a "lite" version where they manage the context more manually (like sending the full transcript or using a custom web.run tool instead of the provided `web_search` tool).

If you follow the docs, it will lead you down a lot of well-intended functionality, but most of it is thrown away in their most successful harness.

[0]https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents#compare...

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#59
post #10

Since a week or so everything I ask codex to do, no matter how small, uses at least 1% of my weekly limits and like 5% of my 5h limit. It's getting so bad I'm thinking of just canceling my OpenAI subscription, because this has no use anymore.

I also signed up for a new account and it's right back to working how it used to. They absolutely do not consume tokens equally across accounts. I did TONS of work on the new account and barely made a dent, even on Astra. Old account chews through 20% like it's nothing
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