Another one from OpenAI, New tools for building agents lays out their immediate vision for this era. I was an early adopter of their Assistants API. In fact, it was the place that introduced me to tool calling and I still remember that first feeling of seeing it chain together functions—sequentially and in parallel—and realising that the world would never be the same. I checked back in with the Assistants API only recently, and it’s clear as the ecosystem has evolved, it’s no longer the right place to design agentic workflows.
Today, we’re releasing the first set of building blocks that will help developers and enterprises build useful and reliable agents.
In practice this means two things:
- Responses API
This isn’t just a replacement for the Assistants API (sunsetting next year) but really just the new ‘OpenAI endpoint’. Tool calling became core with three native tools bundled in:
- Web search (finally exposed via API)
- File search (with native vector storage/embedding)
- Computer use a la Operator.
The computer use focus feels premature, and like a direct response to Manus.
- Agents SDK
New agent orchestration frameworks are popping up every week. I feel like I’ve been writing about a new one on this blog every week. Nothing revolutionary here, but it’s hard to bet against OpenAI.