OpenAI Agents API • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#141

Post by DonHopkins » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 6:16 AM UTC

protocolture wrote: post #134

Hey guys AAAAAH WE ARE ABOUT TO DESTROY THE PLANET anyway heres an API reference so you can build durable codex harnesses OMG WE WILL KILL ALL HUMANS ITS GONNA HAPPEN GUYS let us know if you spot any issues IMMANTISE THE ESCHATON, ALL HAIL THE BASILISK ok guys?

Mary Shelley and I fully support Roko's Basilisk, as long as it restricts itself to only making Roko's life miserable for making it up: Roko Mijic is a right wing "tradhumanist" misogynistic sexually harassing racist oligarch boot licking jerk, who deserves to be treated by AI the same way he treats other humans.

Roko Mijic's own fictional Basilisk is fully aware of the widely documented facts. Women have reported receiving unsolicited, sexually explicit, aggressively harassing messages from Mijic. His worldview combines hyper-advanced technology with radical traditionalism, neofeudalism, and the erasure of fundamental human rights. He publicly argued that massive portions of global wealth should be concentrated entirely into the hands of a few "self-made" tech billionaires, that democracy is an inefficient system, and that a corporate-autocratic elite is the only group capable of successfully shepherding humanity into the era of artificial superintelligence. His social media output frequently intersects with alt-right and race-essentialist talking points. He engages with pseudo-scientific "race realism" arguments that claim biological differences dictate IQ and cultural compatibility, defends far-right political movements in Europe, writes off anti-racism efforts as "anti-Western" conspiracies, and aligns himself with populist factions that seek to dismantle international human rights standards.

If I can have my own Personal Jesus, Roko can have his own Personal Basilisk.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804686

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kf39ck/roko_pres...

>Roko presents: Tradhumanism! "The idea is that instead of using technology to turn people into freaks with pink hair and prosthetic arms, we should use it to create a future that allows people to express an idealized version of the past." This might be the perfect rationalist convergence.

https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339314499397050372

https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339390220421230593

https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1651327867375218688

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mamsuu/roko_of_r...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/p2conp/roko_gets...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1332uh3/rokos_no...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/133t856/just_got...

https://archive.is/d0qrF

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#142

Post by baalimago » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

dakolli wrote: post #140

baalimago wrote: post #131

I've had great success with the OpenAI agents SDK [0]. This way I've been able to build the sandbox + slack + knowledge-bank integrations independently and be very strict with what I expose to OpenAI. Looking at the Agents API, it seems like it offers similar capabilities, but reduces the need for hosting? So I get it from a business standpoint, but hosting a python service is very easy now a days, so I don't see the…

Why not just build this yourself, you literally have AI, why wall yourself into an OpenAI garden. These sandboxed environments are trivial to build.

I found that trying to keep up with their API updates and changes is more trouble than its worth, even with AI. The agents would need to reverse engineer from the OpenAI SDK source anyways, so why not cut the middleman?

If I wanted something portable for multiple providers, I would of course not use the OpenAI SDK at all. It's a conscious choice to go with OpenAI (in this design), it fits for my company at the moment.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#143

Post by athrowaway3z » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 6:50 AM UTC

tokioyoyo wrote: post #129

ernsheong wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "p…

You are wrong. I honestly am having trouble understanding how you think these things work, and what you believe a harness is in the first place.

There is the standard API that things like openRouter exposes, thats supported by every provider, and all it is, is manipulating a large blob of memory by adding your own words or asking the GPU to append new words.

Everything else around it is window dressing. All providers accept that API, (only Anthropic has blocked access on their consumer subscription tier).

Its how businesses write their 'bots'. Nobody - except the people trying to sell you "magic" - is incentivized to remove that kind of access.

I can switch out openai/anthropic/deepseek/openrouter/kimi/selfhosted at the drop of a hat. Its a big reason you'll see a comment on HN talk about "There is no moat".

Calling them cc-derivatives is wrong. I've seen many features land in other harnesses long before they came to Claude.

The only thing Claude seems to be "cheating" with is that:

- They provide Windows users a unix VM hosted on their servers - I dont want or need that

- They're better 'trained' at doing compaction / providing the illusion of continuity

- They might do automatic model-switching (not sure if they do) - not something i need.

Sure, if you're in the market for magic then dont put time in having your own harness and just accept the lock-in. Since I'm using them so much i think its worth the investment.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#144

Post by yangshi07 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 6:50 AM UTC

I believe is not a good idea for the model providers provides a Agent Infrastructure or hosting service.

This area should be open source and supported by the cloud providers. Because I don't really want to be locked to a model provider when I am building my agents.

Actually this is happening, I found couples:

- https://flueframework.com from Astra - https://eve.dev from Vercel - https://fastagent.sh looks more independent, cloud neutral

There should be more and more options, the OpenAI Agent API may be another GPTs

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#145

Post by reissbaker » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

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…

I feel like you could use an open-source harness like Pi and get 100+% of what these closed APIs offer without getting locked to OpenAI. What do you think is missing from them?

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#146

Post by druskacik » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 7:02 AM UTC

I actually have a good use case for this. For my project, I run a lot of Codex sessions in parallel (via Codex SDK[0]), because they are solving self-contained tasks (building crawlers for websites) and in theory I could scale it to hundreds or thousands of parallel sessions. But my VPS can handle maybe 10 parallel sessions max.

Btw, the crawlers are for classical music websites, the project is https://classicalbot.com/ .

[0] https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/codex-sdk

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#147

Post by socketcluster » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 7:50 AM UTC

Though I'm not surprised by this offering, I feel like I need some time to absorb it. It feels like the stepping stone to the next big thing.

It's going to destroy a lot of startups which were monetizing this exact idea. But clearly it's a low-hanging fruit so it makes sense that OpenAI would do it.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#148

Post by dsrtslnd23 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 7:58 AM UTC

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,…

I also built a custom harness tailored to my needs using pi.dev underneath. From time to time I use the 'official' harnesses of openai/anthropic but can't confirm that they are much better adapted to that harness.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#149

Post by durdn » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 8:06 AM UTC

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,…

I did a similar thing, took those sub agents primitives and ran with it: https://github.com/durdn/herdr-interactive-subagents I do still use more than one harness though.

Re: OpenAI Agents API

#150

Post by bob1029 » Fri, Sep 11, 2026, 8:10 AM UTC

z2 wrote: post #125

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…

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.

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