OpenAI Agents API

maxdo

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

542458

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.

chairhairair

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

simonw

I jumped straight to the section on configuring your sandbox's 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?

spwa4

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.

johnnyApplePRNG

Now you, too, can ripoff mathematicians worldwide!

monneyboi

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

krashidov

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

kingstnap

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.

colesantiago

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

everlier

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

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?

andrewchambers

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.

Art9681

Likely benchmaxed.

bluesnowmonkey

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.

agentifysh

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

shchoholiev

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

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

jumploops

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...

varenc

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-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 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...