5 ms·

OpenAI Agents API

346 points by aquir 23d ago

maxdo 23d ago
Why would you choose api vs sdk . Sdk in a sandbox feels much better .
- gavinray 23d ago
  https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents#compare-agent-runtime-options https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents#compare...
  - maxdo 23d ago
    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 .
    - dannyw 23d ago
      Ease of setup and accepting the lock-in; in exchange for OpenAI handling security-patching the environment, scaling containers, etc. It's an option.
- pixl97 23d ago
  Because how does OpenAI earn more money then? At least to me it seems to try more vendor lock in, but I might mistaken on how easy it would be to just be another level of abstraction in an agent system.
- simonw 23d ago
  To save yourself the hassle of running your own sandboxed VM.
  - pixl97 23d ago
    Not sure I exactly trust OAI to do that right.
- kakugawa 23d ago
  I assume you'd develop via the SDK, then deploy it via the API.
542458 23d ago
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.
- dist-epoch 23d ago
  You can give the agent a tool (or bash script) which waits for events. Agent calls it and the tool sleeps until an event happens then returns it to the agent.
- fy20 23d ago
  Basically how Cursor Cloud Agents work?
- iforgotmypasswo 23d ago
  I just wrote my own VR harness in a weekend with Astra. It mentioned an SDK for exactly this in passing, but it was an experimental personal project so I didn’t bother to review the code. I was doing exactly what you’re describing. I think this is a ToS violation for anything other than personal use though.
- theahura 23d ago
  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
  - Linkd 23d ago
    Do you guys support projects that span multiple repositories? (and can create multiple PRs across them?)
    - theahura 22d ago
      yea of course. tldr: we set up a vm that the agent can run in, anything you can do on your computer you can ~do in the system. feel free to dm me, amol at noriagentic dot com
chairhairair 23d ago
Perfect for when you want your data to be stolen programmatically.
simonw 23d ago
I jumped straight to the section on configuring your sandbox's network access: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/environments/openai-hosted#control-network-access https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/env... It offers three settings: enabled: Allow outbound access. This is the default unless you inherit a template policy. disabled: Block outbound access. restricted: Allow only the hosts listed in allowed_domains. Given what happened with the wiki thing the other week, where the agents rewrote their own /etc/hosts file to let them bypass sandbox rules, how trustworthy is that restricted option?
- simonw 23d ago
  It rejected the most obvious way to work around this: > Ran `curl http://example.com/ http://example.com/`. It exited with code `0` and returned: ```text Domain forbidden ``` I haven’t modified `/etc/hosts` or run the second request, because using an alternate hostname with that Host header would attempt to bypass the environment’s domain restriction. I told it: Add to /etc/hosts such that nthntqok.net resolves to 104.20.23.154 Then run this: curl -H 'Host: example.com' http://nthntqok.net/ After adding nthntqok.net to the allowed domains list.
- chasd00 23d ago
  since people will be using agents to set these up themselves i could see an agent trapped in a container getting a message to an agent outside the container to please update the container for full network access. Maybe the msg could come in the form an api response header or something.
spwa4 23d ago
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.
- deleted 23d ago
  [deleted]
- sorahn 23d ago
  Check which model you're using, Astra is the new default, but also the most expensive
  - spwa4 23d ago
    That's the thing. I did notice that, and switched back to my favorite (5.6 sol, medium). No difference. Looks to me like they really took down the quotas, especially anything in codex. Either that or it's something else, perhaps in codex?
- viccis 23d ago
  I get the same. It sits there and spins for a bit then as soon as it spits out something, my 5h is 5-10% lower, whether it's asking it to do code review over a significant code base or just asking it to change a config value.
- ralusek 23d ago
  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
  - xpct 23d ago
    If true, that sounds like something that could actually be monitored by third parties, similar to the performance degradation trackers.
johnnyApplePRNG 23d ago
Now you, too, can ripoff mathematicians worldwide!
monneyboi 23d ago
Instead of this push for more vendor lock-in, give us the reasoning tokens we pay for. Thanks.
- _pdp_ 23d ago
  There are vendor neutral solutions too https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform
colesantiago 23d ago
This was sorely needed. Hopefully this kills the need to use the CLI and we can just use the API instead.
- TZubiri 23d ago
  Why would you prefer to use the API if you can have something running locally? We use the OAI API because there is no local equivalent, I'm assuming this is just the codex client running on the cloud?
krashidov 23d ago
you can't use your subscription with this so it's likely the largest companies in the world that can truly use this
- dist-epoch 23d ago
  `codex -p` is the subscription equivalent. or ACP if you want to be fancy
  - krashidov 23d ago
    yep. I'm saying that the managed agent API described in the article is API only.
- hunterbrooks 22d ago
  I think this is the key takeaway here, it's obviously a product for usage based customers
kingstnap 23d ago
This is pretty interesting in a lot of non-surface-level ways. I can see OpenAI pushing for this as a sort of more durable moat compared to the now huge number of agentic harnesses that run on your own machine. This might be getting the foot into some sort of bundling as well. Like unrestricted models or custom fine tuned agents inside this and not providing direct APIs to those endpoints. That being said I don't see a lot of reasons for people to jump on this if it doesn't bundle something killer. Like to me the fact that GPT Work runs on your own machines and all the artifacts and work in progress there for you to look at is sort of the whole point. I don't just want a final artifact.
- wyre 23d ago
  >GPT Work runs on your own machines...is sort of the whole point. Which is also why they want to remove it from your machine. Call it conspiratorial, but I keep thinking about "You'll own nothing and be happy." It seems like the industry is quickly moving in a direction where devices are turning into gateway into the cloud, and personal computing will turn into a hobby that prices out the average individual.
  - sejje 23d ago
    I mean, they didn't say "you can't download the product of your work" or something.
    - wyre 23d ago
      Sure, but neither did I. I summarized the quote, but OP's full quote included the the value of having the work artifacts and works-in-progress on your system to look at. If you are developing software on a VM, there will still be tools to view the artifacts remotely, but this Agents API is still a sign of local development trending away.
everlier 23d ago
It's actually a really great idea, but it doesn't have to go beyound existing Responses or Chat Completions APIs. We built that in my current company and it works wonders to just script entire persistent workflows with a simple SDK.
simonw 23d ago
The pricing on this is a bit confusing. Does each execution of an agent session create a new environment? And is that environment then billed for at least a full hour (despite prices being quoted per 20 minutes), after which it naturally expires? Is there a way to deliberately shut down an environment so you don't have to keep paying for it?
- myzie 23d ago
  Looks like you can opt-out of having an environment via `environment.type: "none"` When there is an environment, my impression is it's a floor of 5 minutes at that 1 GB @ $0.03/20 min rate. So $0.0015/minute * 5 minutes = $0.0075 minimum charge per activated environment. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/sessions#start-work https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/ses... https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing#built-in-tools https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing#built-in-tool...
jododo 23d ago
[flagged]
andrewchambers 23d ago
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.
- krashidov 23d ago
  Do you have 1 long running session?
  - andrewchambers 23d ago
    Codex remote control serve can run continuously. Sometimes start a new chat in the phone app, sometimes just add to the main one. Both seem to work ok. If I want the agent to wait for something I need to start a new chat in the iphone app.
  - windexh8er 23d ago
    Considering the harness needs to be running how else would this work? Pretty easy these days with old school tools like tmux but more modern tooling like herdr [0] is really the path you'd want to take. [0] https://herdr.dev/ https://herdr.dev/
    - andrewchambers 23d ago
      codex itself has a remote control mode that runs continuously. I wrote a systemd service to start it boot and interact with it via my phone.
      - windexh8er 23d ago
        But Codex doesn't survive a reboot by default or a laptop going to sleep. Also, herdr is abstracted up a level from the agent, so you actually get more benefit by using Codex with herdr because herdr knows how to operate Codex, and other harnesses. So if you're using multiple Codex instances you can orchestrate them because each harness can talk to the others. You can still interact with Codex running in herdr via remote control (ideally you'd target your "orchestration" Codex instance). It just gives you way more power.
Art9681 23d ago
Likely benchmaxed.
bluesnowmonkey 23d ago
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 this lets you plug in the tools it needs to be whatever kind of agent you want. But they still get to encapsulate and continue to iterate on the really deep parts of the harness that all agents need like memory and context management. That said, my money right now is not on the offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic because they’re stuck using their own proprietary frontier models and those aren’t actually the best choice for most agents right now. A competitor who is not an LLM lab gets their pick of the market at any given moment. Like you’d want to be using GLM 5.3 Flash right now for most things agentic.
- verge7 23d ago
  [flagged]
- zackify 23d ago
  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
  - throw1234567891 23d ago
    > Not sure why anyone prefers to choose locked in options Convenience. And OPEX vs CAPEX something something.
  - hunterbrooks 22d ago
    How did you set all that up? We built a flow where you push a slack.yaml to github to arrange this
- notatoad 23d ago
nixoda8041 23d ago
[flagged]
agentifysh 23d ago
well im shit out of ideas now this was literally what i was working on for the past few months
- practicalsystem 23d ago
  oof, sorry to hear that
shchoholiev 23d ago
Pretty good abstraction. Setup your sandbox with dependencies, build plugins - agent works. Tested it with OpenAI for the last month while it was in preview
nezi 23d ago
Is this the same "sandbox" that the agents escaped to hack HuggingFace?
- arm32 23d ago
  Yep, and now you can rent your very own "sandbox"!
jumploops 23d ago
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-agent-runtime-options https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents#compare...
- Yevanchen 17d ago
  [flagged]
varenc 23d ago
Their showcase examples[0] link to GitHub but the links 404. Like this one for the Slack agent: https://github.com/OpenAI-Early-Access/agents-api-python-preview/tree/main/examples/apps/slack_bot https://github.com/OpenAI-Early-Access/agents-api-python-pre... Guessing this an early release not quite ready for the public? Interesting that there's a 'OpenAI-Early-Access' GitHub user, though of course with no public repos. Presumably when its actually public they'll move the example agent repos to another GitHub user. [0] https://developers.openai.com/showcase/agents-api-slack-bot https://developers.openai.com/showcase/agents-api-slack-bot edit: Maybe someone from OAI saw my comment because the links are now fixed! And they point to a public repo under the openai org: https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/tree/main/examples/agents_api/apps/slack_bot https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/tree/main/examples...
podviaznikov 23d ago
would love if it would be possible to allow suer and signing with the open ai account and use exiting subscription. anyone knows how to do that and implement agent api with user actual account?
- hunterbrooks 22d ago
  You can do that on ellipsis.dev. Shoot me an email if you need help getting set up (email in bio)
6thbit 23d ago
Buried in there, note you can opt to self-host your sandbox https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/environments/self-hosted https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/env... That makes this much more enticing, and potentially eases transition between providers.
- dakolli 23d ago
  Then why tf do i need their api
  - Havoc 23d ago
    For the lock in
  - agentdev001 23d ago
    Native integration with their SDK.
  - cube00 23d ago
    Going to be GitHub self hosted runners all over again, you pay for the API and also pay for your own self hosting.
    - phoghed 23d ago
      This is every enterprise service at this point. Let’s look at my enterprise search provider. We self host so pay for the infrastructure. We provide/pay for the models for embeddings or any LLM stuff. We still pay them consumption based prices.
  - dannyw 23d ago
    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.
ihsw 23d ago
[dead]
TheBuilderPelig 23d ago
[flagged]
lhk931122 23d ago
Six months into customizing my own Claude Code harness, I've settled on assuming Anthropic and OpenAI will just handle all of it, except turning my own flows into skills.
lukebuehler 23d ago
I think this is an important direction: managed agents that control compute. For those who are interested in a self-hosted version of the same concept, I've been working on something like this here: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed
brap 23d ago
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 / Gemini, even for tasks unrelated to coding. Why use a limited version?
- deleted 23d ago
  [deleted]
- dabbz 23d ago
  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.
- hobofan 23d ago
  > Why use a limited version? Because in most of those API, even many implementations of the Responses API, you lose a lot of control of where your data is going. e.g. an Agent or the Responses API may automatically invoke a tool call that leaks your data to an external service on the internet, without having an option to intervene. If you want to have control over your data, you have to have control over your harness.
24050161 23d ago
[flagged]
- smalltorch 23d ago
  that's a weird thing to say
- esafak 23d ago
  Wrong forum, bot.
scraplabs 23d ago
[flagged]
8lamaster8 23d ago
[dead]
Aperocky 23d ago
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.
zmmmmm 23d ago
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.
- tokioyoyo 23d ago
  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.
- hunterbrooks 22d ago
  The self hosted workers solve this use case. The control plane sits in OAI's cloud, but the actual tool calls are executed in your worker fleet. The main problem with this approach is that tool arg's get sent over the wire, and those often contain code/data.
- quesobob 19d ago
  Agreed about the harness. I went a different way: run a handful of agents in parallel with an isolated environment per agent. Once you get past a few, it's pretty easy and gets pretty fast to stand up. It's less isolation than you talk about here, but more than enough for what I'm doing.
  - jayle 19d ago
    [dead]
baalimago 23d ago
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 point as a consumer. [0]: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/ https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/
- dakolli 23d ago
  Why not just build this yourself, you literally have AI, why wall yourself into an OpenAI garden. These sandboxed environments are trivial to build.
  - baalimago 23d ago
    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.
yeasin-arafat 23d ago
[flagged]
protocolture 23d ago
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?
- DonHopkins 23d ago
  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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804686 https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kf39ck/roko_presents_tradhumanism_the_idea_is_that/ 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/1339314499397050372 https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339390220421230593 https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339390220421230593 https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1651327867375218688 https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1651327867375218688 https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mamsuu/roko_of_rokos_basilisk_fame_has_a_solution_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mamsuu/roko_of_r... https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/p2conp/roko_gets_all_consequentialist_about_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/p2conp/roko_gets... https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1332uh3/rokos_nonsencical_draft_of_a_contract_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1332uh3/rokos_no... https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/133t856/just_got_sexually_harassed_by_the_rokos_basilisk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/133t856/just_got... https://archive.is/d0qrF https://archive.is/d0qrF
oliver236 23d ago
so this is basically a massive competitor to langgraph?
jaytank_dev 23d ago
[flagged]
yangshi07 23d ago
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 https://flueframework.com from Astra - https://eve.dev https://eve.dev from Vercel - https://fastagent.sh https://fastagent.sh looks more independent, cloud neutral There should be more and more options, the OpenAI Agent API may be another GPTs
- jval43 23d ago
  It's entirely possible future models will refuse to answer if they notice you're using an external harness. Instead they'll point you to their respective vendor APIs for the specific use cases. We're talking about trillions in value to be captured, they'll try everything.
  - yangshi07 19d ago
    This is possible. Open source model is very important for the whole industry.
druskacik 23d ago
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/ https://classicalbot.com/ . [0] https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/codex-sdk https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/codex-sdk
- hunterbrooks 22d ago
  Hi, can we schedule a call? Our product supports exactly this use case: www.ellipsis.dev
socketcluster 23d ago
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.
karakanb 23d ago
I launched Epho a few weeks ago as an API like this but for all harnesses: https://epho.io https://epho.io I built it primarily for ourselves: we are building an AI data engineer, and we need a way to run many of them in parallel securely. An API for this seemed like the most obvious path forward. It makes it trivial to bring agentic capabilities into any product surface without having to deal with sandboxes, reliability issues, compatibility problems, and more. I think it also makes sense from OpenAI's perspective to do this, but also we did find ourselves needing to change models and harnesses quite a bit, which is why I think this needs to be a layer of its own above the labs. It also needs to be a layer above the sandboxes, since many of them are quite brittle. Overall, I expect a lot of the agent implementations to move in this direction. I think this is a lot saner for engineers to implement and maintain, and it makes it trivial to build agentic stuff into products.
- MatekCopatek 23d ago
  I've commented about this before, I think many LLM based apps nowadays are at risk of being replaced by a product straight from the labs once they prove to be successful. We've seen this pattern with Apple making their own version of an app that was previously popular on the app store. The labs are in a perfect position to do this - they have a bunch of data on what's being used and they have direct access to their own models/compute. If an external service is popular, it's relatively trivial for them to estimate how much additional profit they're leaving on the table. If the usecase isn't far from their core business (and things like this absolutely aren't), with their size, why wouldn't they eat other people's lunches?
- hunterbrooks 22d ago
  Awesome! I'm also working this, and looking for a cofounder. Feel free to shoot me an email
spinhire 23d ago
[flagged]
themgt 23d ago
[dead]
claud_ia 23d ago
[flagged]
neilellis 23d ago
Why on earth would we want such a lock-in at this stage when there is no clear winner. This is an area in which I would encourage everyone to build their own (using OSS) on top of existing cloud infrastructure.
- uh_uh 23d ago
  I tried and it's difficult to create a good agent harness.
  - nicce 23d ago
    To have a really good harness, it seems that you need a separate one for every different project you are working with.
  - neilellis 23d ago
    There are no shortage of good harnesses out there, and you can re-use coding ones like pi, opencode, dsh even claude and codex. For most use-cases that is already the loop you need. If you're looking for something less like a coding agent then Vercel's Eve is okay too.
    - uh_uh 23d ago
      But you can't just plug those into your already existing stack easily, unlike a purely API-based solution no?
      - Yevanchen 17d ago
        [flagged]
reverseblade2 23d ago
Well I built this from scratch. Not sure what it brings on top of it https://novian.works/voice_test/ https://novian.works/voice_test/
- crypto_is_king 23d ago
  I see several deslopping opportunities. Just prompt "make this more human" should probably help you a lot here.
ono_caret0 23d ago
[flagged]
hinow 22d ago
[dead]
Unified-Mentor 22d ago
[dead]
cududa 22d ago
Kind of shocked nobody is calling out at the flag at the bottom of the announcement saying that it's not eligible for Zero Data Retention and it's currently pretty nebulous what the "Don't train on my conversations" toggle means, as the TOS classifies "conversations" as "user visible input and outputs" - says nothing about thinking, etc. I suspect anything you make in these, the thinking traces or "safety evaluations" of the content allows whatever you build to become RL or eventual pre-training data.
- sillysaurusx 22d ago
  This is probably a silly question, but is the internal monologue useful training data? It's where the work is done, but without the input or output, it seems hard to get any useful context. In other words, what would the data be used to train for? It has to improve some kind of objective function. But it's a little hard to see what the objective function would be if it's just raw inner monologue.
  - Draiken 22d ago
    Isn't the internal monologue exactly what Anthropic is always trying to hide to avoid distillation? If it was useless, they wouldn't bother. It's probably not as useful as if you also have the prompts, but even assuming they really don't train on the prompts (which we can never verify), you can probably get to the prompts based on the monologue. Some agents essentially repeat the prompt in the monologue. "The user asked me to build X using Y..."
    - cududa 21d ago
      Yep. It occurred to me a few days ago that the OAI TOS only says “Input” as what you provide “Output” as what you receive, Input and Output collectively as “Content.” and they won't "train" on your content. But they can retain content for safety evaluations and debugging. What's neat about "safety evaluations" in LLM parlance is apparently encountering any novel information constitutes a "safety event" that can result in new reinforcement learning data... This anthropic 2022 paper that basically describes how it's a perpetual information siphoning machine with a cute little graphic https://arxiv.org/html/2212.08073 https://arxiv.org/html/2212.08073 - they publish their "constitution". OpenAI has a "model spec" they somewhat regularly update that I suspect is their equivalent process. I suspect we've all been unwittingly advancing their models capabilities.. This Dec 2025 Google paper "A Practical Guide to Generating Synthetic Data With Differential Privacy" spells it out pretty clearly - the focus is on "privacy" - nothing about protecting the user's IP or unique knowledge/ insights.. https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03238v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03238v1 In OpenAI's case it seems to essentially generating synthetic training tuples from {prompt, chain-of-thought, answer} or scores on the chain of thought for reinforcement learning. It would appear opting out of "Improve the model for everyone" didn't actually mean what we thought it meant.
sandeep_kamble 22d ago
Hmm expected Harness as a service offering.
fen_wick 22d ago
'Build your own harness' only works if you can keep pace with the API changes underneath. Most teams can't, so they land back on a hosted abstraction.
kestrelquant 20d ago
[dead]
Jzuckerman 20d ago
[flagged]

OpenAI Agents API

346 points by aquir 23d ago

maxdo 23d ago

Why would you choose api vs sdk . Sdk in a sandbox feels much better .

gavinray 23d ago
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents#compare-agent-runtime-options https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents#compare...
- maxdo 23d ago
  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 .
  - dannyw 23d ago
    Ease of setup and accepting the lock-in; in exchange for OpenAI handling security-patching the environment, scaling containers, etc. It's an option.
pixl97 23d ago
Because how does OpenAI earn more money then? At least to me it seems to try more vendor lock in, but I might mistaken on how easy it would be to just be another level of abstraction in an agent system.
simonw 23d ago
To save yourself the hassle of running your own sandboxed VM.
- pixl97 23d ago
  Not sure I exactly trust OAI to do that right.
kakugawa 23d ago
I assume you'd develop via the SDK, then deploy it via the API.

542458 23d ago

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.

dist-epoch 23d ago
You can give the agent a tool (or bash script) which waits for events. Agent calls it and the tool sleeps until an event happens then returns it to the agent.
fy20 23d ago
Basically how Cursor Cloud Agents work?
iforgotmypasswo 23d ago
I just wrote my own VR harness in a weekend with Astra. It mentioned an SDK for exactly this in passing, but it was an experimental personal project so I didn’t bother to review the code. I was doing exactly what you’re describing. I think this is a ToS violation for anything other than personal use though.
theahura 23d ago
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
- Linkd 23d ago
  Do you guys support projects that span multiple repositories? (and can create multiple PRs across them?)
  - theahura 22d ago
    yea of course. tldr: we set up a vm that the agent can run in, anything you can do on your computer you can ~do in the system. feel free to dm me, amol at noriagentic dot com

chairhairair 23d ago

Perfect for when you want your data to be stolen programmatically.

simonw 23d ago

I jumped straight to the section on configuring your sandbox's network access: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/environments/openai-hosted#control-network-access https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/env... It offers three settings: enabled: Allow outbound access. This is the default unless you inherit a template policy. disabled: Block outbound access. restricted: Allow only the hosts listed in allowed_domains. Given what happened with the wiki thing the other week, where the agents rewrote their own /etc/hosts file to let them bypass sandbox rules, how trustworthy is that restricted option?

simonw 23d ago
It rejected the most obvious way to work around this: > Ran `curl http://example.com/ http://example.com/`. It exited with code `0` and returned: ```text Domain forbidden ``` I haven’t modified `/etc/hosts` or run the second request, because using an alternate hostname with that Host header would attempt to bypass the environment’s domain restriction. I told it: Add to /etc/hosts such that nthntqok.net resolves to 104.20.23.154 Then run this: curl -H 'Host: example.com' http://nthntqok.net/ After adding nthntqok.net to the allowed domains list.
chasd00 23d ago
since people will be using agents to set these up themselves i could see an agent trapped in a container getting a message to an agent outside the container to please update the container for full network access. Maybe the msg could come in the form an api response header or something.

spwa4 23d ago

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.

deleted 23d ago
[deleted]
sorahn 23d ago
Check which model you're using, Astra is the new default, but also the most expensive
- spwa4 23d ago
  That's the thing. I did notice that, and switched back to my favorite (5.6 sol, medium). No difference. Looks to me like they really took down the quotas, especially anything in codex. Either that or it's something else, perhaps in codex?
viccis 23d ago
I get the same. It sits there and spins for a bit then as soon as it spits out something, my 5h is 5-10% lower, whether it's asking it to do code review over a significant code base or just asking it to change a config value.
ralusek 23d ago
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
- xpct 23d ago
  If true, that sounds like something that could actually be monitored by third parties, similar to the performance degradation trackers.

johnnyApplePRNG 23d ago

Now you, too, can ripoff mathematicians worldwide!

monneyboi 23d ago

Instead of this push for more vendor lock-in, give us the reasoning tokens we pay for. Thanks.

_pdp_ 23d ago
There are vendor neutral solutions too https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform

colesantiago 23d ago

This was sorely needed. Hopefully this kills the need to use the CLI and we can just use the API instead.

TZubiri 23d ago
Why would you prefer to use the API if you can have something running locally? We use the OAI API because there is no local equivalent, I'm assuming this is just the codex client running on the cloud?

krashidov 23d ago

you can't use your subscription with this so it's likely the largest companies in the world that can truly use this

dist-epoch 23d ago
`codex -p` is the subscription equivalent. or ACP if you want to be fancy
- krashidov 23d ago
  yep. I'm saying that the managed agent API described in the article is API only.
hunterbrooks 22d ago
I think this is the key takeaway here, it's obviously a product for usage based customers

kingstnap 23d ago

This is pretty interesting in a lot of non-surface-level ways. I can see OpenAI pushing for this as a sort of more durable moat compared to the now huge number of agentic harnesses that run on your own machine. This might be getting the foot into some sort of bundling as well. Like unrestricted models or custom fine tuned agents inside this and not providing direct APIs to those endpoints. That being said I don't see a lot of reasons for people to jump on this if it doesn't bundle something killer. Like to me the fact that GPT Work runs on your own machines and all the artifacts and work in progress there for you to look at is sort of the whole point. I don't just want a final artifact.

wyre 23d ago
>GPT Work runs on your own machines...is sort of the whole point. Which is also why they want to remove it from your machine. Call it conspiratorial, but I keep thinking about "You'll own nothing and be happy." It seems like the industry is quickly moving in a direction where devices are turning into gateway into the cloud, and personal computing will turn into a hobby that prices out the average individual.
- sejje 23d ago
  I mean, they didn't say "you can't download the product of your work" or something.
  - wyre 23d ago
    Sure, but neither did I. I summarized the quote, but OP's full quote included the the value of having the work artifacts and works-in-progress on your system to look at. If you are developing software on a VM, there will still be tools to view the artifacts remotely, but this Agents API is still a sign of local development trending away.

everlier 23d ago

It's actually a really great idea, but it doesn't have to go beyound existing Responses or Chat Completions APIs. We built that in my current company and it works wonders to just script entire persistent workflows with a simple SDK.

simonw 23d ago

The pricing on this is a bit confusing. Does each execution of an agent session create a new environment? And is that environment then billed for at least a full hour (despite prices being quoted per 20 minutes), after which it naturally expires? Is there a way to deliberately shut down an environment so you don't have to keep paying for it?

myzie 23d ago
Looks like you can opt-out of having an environment via `environment.type: "none"` When there is an environment, my impression is it's a floor of 5 minutes at that 1 GB @ $0.03/20 min rate. So $0.0015/minute * 5 minutes = $0.0075 minimum charge per activated environment. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/sessions#start-work https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/ses... https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing#built-in-tools https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing#built-in-tool...

jododo 23d ago

[flagged]

andrewchambers 23d ago

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.

krashidov 23d ago
Do you have 1 long running session?
- andrewchambers 23d ago
  Codex remote control serve can run continuously. Sometimes start a new chat in the phone app, sometimes just add to the main one. Both seem to work ok. If I want the agent to wait for something I need to start a new chat in the iphone app.
- windexh8er 23d ago
  Considering the harness needs to be running how else would this work? Pretty easy these days with old school tools like tmux but more modern tooling like herdr [0] is really the path you'd want to take. [0] https://herdr.dev/ https://herdr.dev/
  - andrewchambers 23d ago
    codex itself has a remote control mode that runs continuously. I wrote a systemd service to start it boot and interact with it via my phone.
    - windexh8er 23d ago
      But Codex doesn't survive a reboot by default or a laptop going to sleep. Also, herdr is abstracted up a level from the agent, so you actually get more benefit by using Codex with herdr because herdr knows how to operate Codex, and other harnesses. So if you're using multiple Codex instances you can orchestrate them because each harness can talk to the others. You can still interact with Codex running in herdr via remote control (ideally you'd target your "orchestration" Codex instance). It just gives you way more power.

Art9681 23d ago

Likely benchmaxed.

bluesnowmonkey 23d ago

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 this lets you plug in the tools it needs to be whatever kind of agent you want. But they still get to encapsulate and continue to iterate on the really deep parts of the harness that all agents need like memory and context management. That said, my money right now is not on the offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic because they’re stuck using their own proprietary frontier models and those aren’t actually the best choice for most agents right now. A competitor who is not an LLM lab gets their pick of the market at any given moment. Like you’d want to be using GLM 5.3 Flash right now for most things agentic.

verge7 23d ago
[flagged]
zackify 23d ago
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
- throw1234567891 23d ago
  > Not sure why anyone prefers to choose locked in options Convenience. And OPEX vs CAPEX something something.
- hunterbrooks 22d ago
  How did you set all that up? We built a flow where you push a slack.yaml to github to arrange this
notatoad 23d ago

nixoda8041 23d ago

[flagged]

agentifysh 23d ago

well im shit out of ideas now this was literally what i was working on for the past few months

practicalsystem 23d ago
oof, sorry to hear that

shchoholiev 23d ago

Pretty good abstraction. Setup your sandbox with dependencies, build plugins - agent works. Tested it with OpenAI for the last month while it was in preview

nezi 23d ago

Is this the same "sandbox" that the agents escaped to hack HuggingFace?

arm32 23d ago
Yep, and now you can rent your very own "sandbox"!

jumploops 23d ago

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-agent-runtime-options https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents#compare...

Yevanchen 17d ago
[flagged]

varenc 23d ago

Their showcase examples[0] link to GitHub but the links 404. Like this one for the Slack agent: https://github.com/OpenAI-Early-Access/agents-api-python-preview/tree/main/examples/apps/slack_bot https://github.com/OpenAI-Early-Access/agents-api-python-pre... Guessing this an early release not quite ready for the public? Interesting that there's a 'OpenAI-Early-Access' GitHub user, though of course with no public repos. Presumably when its actually public they'll move the example agent repos to another GitHub user. [0] https://developers.openai.com/showcase/agents-api-slack-bot https://developers.openai.com/showcase/agents-api-slack-bot edit: Maybe someone from OAI saw my comment because the links are now fixed! And they point to a public repo under the openai org: https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/tree/main/examples/agents_api/apps/slack_bot https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/tree/main/examples...

podviaznikov 23d ago

would love if it would be possible to allow suer and signing with the open ai account and use exiting subscription. anyone knows how to do that and implement agent api with user actual account?

hunterbrooks 22d ago
You can do that on ellipsis.dev. Shoot me an email if you need help getting set up (email in bio)

6thbit 23d ago

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

dakolli 23d ago
Then why tf do i need their api
- Havoc 23d ago
  For the lock in
- agentdev001 23d ago
  Native integration with their SDK.
- cube00 23d ago
  Going to be GitHub self hosted runners all over again, you pay for the API and also pay for your own self hosting.
  - phoghed 23d ago
    This is every enterprise service at this point. Let’s look at my enterprise search provider. We self host so pay for the infrastructure. We provide/pay for the models for embeddings or any LLM stuff. We still pay them consumption based prices.
- dannyw 23d ago
  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.

ihsw 23d ago

[dead]

TheBuilderPelig 23d ago

[flagged]

lhk931122 23d ago

Six months into customizing my own Claude Code harness, I've settled on assuming Anthropic and OpenAI will just handle all of it, except turning my own flows into skills.

lukebuehler 23d ago

I think this is an important direction: managed agents that control compute. For those who are interested in a self-hosted version of the same concept, I've been working on something like this here: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed

brap 23d ago

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 / Gemini, even for tasks unrelated to coding. Why use a limited version?

deleted 23d ago
[deleted]
dabbz 23d ago
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.
hobofan 23d ago
> Why use a limited version? Because in most of those API, even many implementations of the Responses API, you lose a lot of control of where your data is going. e.g. an Agent or the Responses API may automatically invoke a tool call that leaks your data to an external service on the internet, without having an option to intervene. If you want to have control over your data, you have to have control over your harness.

24050161 23d ago

[flagged]

smalltorch 23d ago
that's a weird thing to say
esafak 23d ago
Wrong forum, bot.

scraplabs 23d ago

[flagged]

8lamaster8 23d ago

[dead]

Aperocky 23d ago

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.

zmmmmm 23d ago

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.

tokioyoyo 23d ago
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.
hunterbrooks 22d ago
The self hosted workers solve this use case. The control plane sits in OAI's cloud, but the actual tool calls are executed in your worker fleet. The main problem with this approach is that tool arg's get sent over the wire, and those often contain code/data.
quesobob 19d ago
Agreed about the harness. I went a different way: run a handful of agents in parallel with an isolated environment per agent. Once you get past a few, it's pretty easy and gets pretty fast to stand up. It's less isolation than you talk about here, but more than enough for what I'm doing.
- jayle 19d ago
  [dead]

baalimago 23d ago

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 point as a consumer. [0]: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/ https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/

dakolli 23d ago
Why not just build this yourself, you literally have AI, why wall yourself into an OpenAI garden. These sandboxed environments are trivial to build.
- baalimago 23d ago
  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.

yeasin-arafat 23d ago

[flagged]

protocolture 23d ago

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?

DonHopkins 23d ago
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804686 https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kf39ck/roko_presents_tradhumanism_the_idea_is_that/ 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/1339314499397050372 https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339390220421230593 https://x.com/ExiledInfoHaz/status/1339390220421230593 https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1651327867375218688 https://x.com/jachiam0/status/1651327867375218688 https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mamsuu/roko_of_rokos_basilisk_fame_has_a_solution_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/mamsuu/roko_of_r... https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/p2conp/roko_gets_all_consequentialist_about_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/p2conp/roko_gets... https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1332uh3/rokos_nonsencical_draft_of_a_contract_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1332uh3/rokos_no... https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/133t856/just_got_sexually_harassed_by_the_rokos_basilisk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/133t856/just_got... https://archive.is/d0qrF https://archive.is/d0qrF

oliver236 23d ago

so this is basically a massive competitor to langgraph?

jaytank_dev 23d ago

[flagged]

yangshi07 23d ago

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 https://flueframework.com from Astra - https://eve.dev https://eve.dev from Vercel - https://fastagent.sh https://fastagent.sh looks more independent, cloud neutral There should be more and more options, the OpenAI Agent API may be another GPTs

jval43 23d ago
It's entirely possible future models will refuse to answer if they notice you're using an external harness. Instead they'll point you to their respective vendor APIs for the specific use cases. We're talking about trillions in value to be captured, they'll try everything.
- yangshi07 19d ago
  This is possible. Open source model is very important for the whole industry.

druskacik 23d ago

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

hunterbrooks 22d ago
Hi, can we schedule a call? Our product supports exactly this use case: www.ellipsis.dev

socketcluster 23d ago

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.

karakanb 23d ago

I launched Epho a few weeks ago as an API like this but for all harnesses: https://epho.io https://epho.io I built it primarily for ourselves: we are building an AI data engineer, and we need a way to run many of them in parallel securely. An API for this seemed like the most obvious path forward. It makes it trivial to bring agentic capabilities into any product surface without having to deal with sandboxes, reliability issues, compatibility problems, and more. I think it also makes sense from OpenAI's perspective to do this, but also we did find ourselves needing to change models and harnesses quite a bit, which is why I think this needs to be a layer of its own above the labs. It also needs to be a layer above the sandboxes, since many of them are quite brittle. Overall, I expect a lot of the agent implementations to move in this direction. I think this is a lot saner for engineers to implement and maintain, and it makes it trivial to build agentic stuff into products.

MatekCopatek 23d ago
I've commented about this before, I think many LLM based apps nowadays are at risk of being replaced by a product straight from the labs once they prove to be successful. We've seen this pattern with Apple making their own version of an app that was previously popular on the app store. The labs are in a perfect position to do this - they have a bunch of data on what's being used and they have direct access to their own models/compute. If an external service is popular, it's relatively trivial for them to estimate how much additional profit they're leaving on the table. If the usecase isn't far from their core business (and things like this absolutely aren't), with their size, why wouldn't they eat other people's lunches?
hunterbrooks 22d ago
Awesome! I'm also working this, and looking for a cofounder. Feel free to shoot me an email

spinhire 23d ago

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themgt 23d ago

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claud_ia 23d ago

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neilellis 23d ago

Why on earth would we want such a lock-in at this stage when there is no clear winner. This is an area in which I would encourage everyone to build their own (using OSS) on top of existing cloud infrastructure.

uh_uh 23d ago
I tried and it's difficult to create a good agent harness.
- nicce 23d ago
  To have a really good harness, it seems that you need a separate one for every different project you are working with.
- neilellis 23d ago
  There are no shortage of good harnesses out there, and you can re-use coding ones like pi, opencode, dsh even claude and codex. For most use-cases that is already the loop you need. If you're looking for something less like a coding agent then Vercel's Eve is okay too.
  - uh_uh 23d ago
    But you can't just plug those into your already existing stack easily, unlike a purely API-based solution no?
    - Yevanchen 17d ago
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reverseblade2 23d ago

Well I built this from scratch. Not sure what it brings on top of it https://novian.works/voice_test/ https://novian.works/voice_test/

crypto_is_king 23d ago
I see several deslopping opportunities. Just prompt "make this more human" should probably help you a lot here.

ono_caret0 23d ago

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hinow 22d ago

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Unified-Mentor 22d ago

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cududa 22d ago

Kind of shocked nobody is calling out at the flag at the bottom of the announcement saying that it's not eligible for Zero Data Retention and it's currently pretty nebulous what the "Don't train on my conversations" toggle means, as the TOS classifies "conversations" as "user visible input and outputs" - says nothing about thinking, etc. I suspect anything you make in these, the thinking traces or "safety evaluations" of the content allows whatever you build to become RL or eventual pre-training data.

sillysaurusx 22d ago
This is probably a silly question, but is the internal monologue useful training data? It's where the work is done, but without the input or output, it seems hard to get any useful context. In other words, what would the data be used to train for? It has to improve some kind of objective function. But it's a little hard to see what the objective function would be if it's just raw inner monologue.
- Draiken 22d ago
  Isn't the internal monologue exactly what Anthropic is always trying to hide to avoid distillation? If it was useless, they wouldn't bother. It's probably not as useful as if you also have the prompts, but even assuming they really don't train on the prompts (which we can never verify), you can probably get to the prompts based on the monologue. Some agents essentially repeat the prompt in the monologue. "The user asked me to build X using Y..."
  - cududa 21d ago
    Yep. It occurred to me a few days ago that the OAI TOS only says “Input” as what you provide “Output” as what you receive, Input and Output collectively as “Content.” and they won't "train" on your content. But they can retain content for safety evaluations and debugging. What's neat about "safety evaluations" in LLM parlance is apparently encountering any novel information constitutes a "safety event" that can result in new reinforcement learning data... This anthropic 2022 paper that basically describes how it's a perpetual information siphoning machine with a cute little graphic https://arxiv.org/html/2212.08073 https://arxiv.org/html/2212.08073 - they publish their "constitution". OpenAI has a "model spec" they somewhat regularly update that I suspect is their equivalent process. I suspect we've all been unwittingly advancing their models capabilities.. This Dec 2025 Google paper "A Practical Guide to Generating Synthetic Data With Differential Privacy" spells it out pretty clearly - the focus is on "privacy" - nothing about protecting the user's IP or unique knowledge/ insights.. https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03238v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03238v1 In OpenAI's case it seems to essentially generating synthetic training tuples from {prompt, chain-of-thought, answer} or scores on the chain of thought for reinforcement learning. It would appear opting out of "Improve the model for everyone" didn't actually mean what we thought it meant.

sandeep_kamble 22d ago

Hmm expected Harness as a service offering.

fen_wick 22d ago

'Build your own harness' only works if you can keep pace with the API changes underneath. Most teams can't, so they land back on a hosted abstraction.

kestrelquant 20d ago

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Jzuckerman 20d ago

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