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OpenAI Agents API

developers.openai.com

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Re: OpenAI Agents API

#121

Post by dabbz »

brap wrote: post #85

I think the line between regular LLM "endpoints" and agents/harnesses is going to become more and more blurry until it's a meaningless distinction. When you're using ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini etc. you're basically already interacting with some backend harness with tools etc., not a raw LLM. Just give it a computer and be done with it. I already find myself using Claude Code / Antigravity (via web) instead of Claude / Gem…

This bothers me so much with the existing offerings. I start with the chat interface then as soon as I want to get technical/run scripts/automation, I have to copy the context into a fresh code session. So cumbersome.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#122

Post by ed_mercer »

542458 wrote: 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.

you mean something like step level debugging for agents?

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#123

Post by andai »

vikramkr wrote: post #119
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #40

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…

IMO building a harness is not wildly difficult (customize pi?) but the offerings from openai and anthropic are wildly subsidized in the subscriptions so they win by default if you want frontier capabilities. Glm 5.3 flash is great but it's not cheaper than a codex or Claude code 200 dollar sub and it does not have astra or fable level capabilities.

Try 50 lines!

https://minimal-agent.com/

I made my own harness based on this, which I jerry rigged to a Codex sub.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#124

Post by andai »

btables wrote: post #56
notatoad wrote: post #47

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 web design. It's rare to see a mobile website with actual personality.

(In fact, "need to support mobile" is the main reason given for the loss of personality from the web as a whole!)

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#125

Post by z2 »

bob1029 wrote: post #65
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #40

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…

After being burned by the rug-pull of OpenAI retiring the Assistants API in favor of Responses last year, I swore off using heavily stateful APIs for language model access. I could be totally wrong, but at this point I'm more willing to use a proprietary harness headless than to abstract it into an API.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#126

Post by Aperocky »

I think in time people will realize harness is essentially a more complicated .vimrc or .zshrc;

And yes, you can install gigantic plugins in those places - e.g. Codex; but the point is everyone will have exactly what they have customized towards. The more atomic a building block is, the easier it can be adapted into any kind of configuration.

I think the pain of selling a harness is if your target market understand what a harness is, then they can build it to exactly how they'd like it without much effort. If they don't, then the harness wouldn't be very useful to them in the first place.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#127

Post by andai »

dools wrote: post #104
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #40

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.…

I also use Luna and DeepSeek in a custom harness. (Mine is very minimal.) GLM also works great.

I had issues with some other models but it seems to do with the system prompt and tool calling format. Some models seem to only work well with some harnesses.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#128

Post by zmmmmm »

This idea of remotely hosting the agent harness is honestly backwards to what I need.

In so many cases, all the friction is about how to provision access to local data so the agent can work. So you started with the problem of how do I integrate an agent that is running locally with data that is hosted locally, and you have to deal with a bunch of security, data sensitivity and management issues around that. Now you moved the agent to a remote host - pretty much all your problems are worse: now I have a remote agent reaching into my infrastructure to deal with.

I'd much rather the inverse of this: let me run the agent local but provide secure remote hosted sandboxes. That actually solves a real problem because the sandbox running locally means breaking out of it directly intersects your local infra, whereas if it runs in a managed hosted environment I can leave the provisioning and management of that to someone else.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#129

Post by tokioyoyo »

ernsheong wrote: post #93
bob1029 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I built my harness in pi within herdr, I cloned (zipped and downloaded) 0xRichardH/pi-herdr-subagents and went from there, and used pi to build itself, adding gate workflow state control, provider fallbacks (I use many token plans), subagent skill injection, etc. It is highly custom to my needs and wants, and I think every developer needs to do this. I only talk to my planner which plans, and it subs out to designer,…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the harness will always be dependent on the underlying model, and useless without it. All custom harnesses are being built, could be obsolete in the next big-generation-jump of the models.

I might be absolutely wrong, but "harnesses" / cc-derivatives became "good enough" only maybe a year ago max. Before that, people were pushing for gigantic folder structures with custom documents and "pretend you're X" stuff.

My point is, depended on what you're trying to achieve, testing out current-gen harnesses, and nudging your workflows towards them might be better RoI, rather than chasing something that might be throwaway code a quarter later.

Obviously, this really depends on whether you believe model development will speed up or slow down in the upcoming future.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#130

Post by tokioyoyo »

zmmmmm wrote: post #128

This idea of remotely hosting the agent harness is honestly backwards to what I need. In so many cases, all the friction is about how to provision access to local data so the agent can work. So you started with the problem of how do I integrate an agent that is running locally with data that is hosted locally, and you have to deal with a bunch of security, data sensitivity and management issues around that. Now you m…

The end goal is not you watching what the agent is doing, verifying, then accepting its changes. In the ideal scenario of automation, the agent does it on your request, doesn't matter wherever you are.

Kind of slack-button-click-to-fix-something workflow.

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