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OpenAI recently released something new: the Agents API.
Out of curiosity, I went through the official docs. After reading them, I found the design quite clever, and it also matches how I think about agents—so I decided to write it down.
What is the Agents API
OpenAI’s description of the Agents API is very direct:
Build and run cloud agents with the Codex harness, fully managed by OpenAI.
In other words, OpenAI runs the Codex harness for you in the cloud.
Cloud capabilities are usually exposed as APIs, hence the name Agents API.
OpenAI is not simply installing Codex in the cloud and letting everyone call it. It extracted the most engineering-heavy part of Codex—the harness—deployed it in the cloud, and made subcomponents configurable via parameters, so building an agent becomes less complex.
