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OpenAI Agents API

developers.openai.com

101–110 of 202 posts

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#101
post #65

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…

> building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole. I eventually gave up on this task. It's not possible to fight OpenAI or Anthropic's engineering teams. Their reasoning models have all kinds of undocumented back door access to the base models that you'd never be able to replicate from the outside. Even if you had full access you would not have the engineering man hours or experience to keep up. I…

Yet i find claude code worse than opencode.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#102
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting concept, but blue ocean as to your target customer. Would be good to see other case studies, use cases for this. Also, thank you for not another “bring your keys” product. Just abstract it away for me.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#103

I've recently had great success running codex in a regular qemu VM and using codex remote control to talk to it from my phone. Honestly works extremely well as a personal assistant. I can see why turning it into an API makes sense, just be aware you might not need to lock yourself in if you can setup your own VMs.

I've done something similar by running pi within an xmpp wrapper on my server, so I can talk to it from any phone or computer. Works super well.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#104

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…

> LLMs are a great foundation but building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole

I’ve been doing this for the past few months. I started with a server where I ran pi in tmux and then used that to build an LLM gateway and agent session manager, then built deterministic workflows using bash scripts and a skill/script distribution system. The app works on desktop, mobile and web and it works great. Non technical colleagues are using it to build and ship real software and it’s cheap AF even using API pricing because it works well with Luna or deepseek.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#105

I've recently had great success running codex in a regular qemu VM and using codex remote control to talk to it from my phone. Honestly works extremely well as a personal assistant. I can see why turning it into an API makes sense, just be aware you might not need to lock yourself in if you can setup your own VMs.

I do the opposite. I have a Slack bot that communicates with an app on my Mac mini that dispatches agents for tasks. It knows all my projects and also has a scheduler that uses the Herdr API. That way I can have things running on my Claude/Codex subs at home 24/7.

Setting up all my code, environment, context, etc in the cloud on VMs seemed like a lot so instead I send back tasks to my Mac mini(s) that are running at home.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#106
post #89
post #66

Buried in there, note you can opt to self-host your sandbox https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/env... That makes this much more enticing, and potentially eases transition between providers.

Then why tf do i need their api

Going to be GitHub self hosted runners all over again, you pay for the API and also pay for your own self hosting.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#107
post #89
post #66

Buried in there, note you can opt to self-host your sandbox https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/env... That makes this much more enticing, and potentially eases transition between providers.

Then why tf do i need their api

Some people/companies/whatever might like the convenience and scalability of managed solutions, especially if you're say, just building something simple like a Slack bot with your custom workplace tools/data.

Yes, the lock-in is real and only good for OpenAI, but there's absolutely demand for managed services where you defer the responsibility of security patching; scaling; uptime, etc to a third party provider. Just like why people use AWS/GCP/etc over bare metal in a colo.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#108
post #8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I get it why do I want to use your managed session , what do you win ? Any examples ? I’m trying to understand the use case but it seems weird middle ground in a way .

Ease of setup and accepting the lock-in; in exchange for OpenAI handling security-patching the environment, scaling containers, etc. It's an option.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#109
post #104

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…

> LLMs are a great foundation but building your own harness is a huge undertaking, a deep rabbit hole I’ve been doing this for the past few months. I started with a server where I ran pi in tmux and then used that to build an LLM gateway and agent session manager, then built deterministic workflows using bash scripts and a skill/script distribution system. The app works on desktop, mobile and web and it works great.…

This is the "i made a voice controlled agent" thread all over again. lol, I too have made a stable of harnesses and tools to run them and have different levels of them monitoring each other and different spends to code/review/triage.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#110

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…

> you’d want to be using GLM 5.3 Flash right now for most things agentic

That was yesterday. I think the crown currently belongs to DeepSeek Flash v4.1 for the next few days or weeks.

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