Thoughts on OpenAI's Dev Day 2025
Sam ended with a final note “You don’t need a big team, you just need an idea.” There's an existential crisis brewing there... but I have a few more thoughts to share.
I wanted to collect a few thoughts on the recent OpenAI Dev Day 2025 announcements from my initial investigation into the tech behind the announcement. Based on a couple years of building AI integrations into applications these are my gut reactions to the presentation.
If you’re unfamiliar with their presentation, it might be valuable to skim through it first.
Now let’s get into it.
Our Take
AgentKit and Agent Builder feels great and looks like what the future of tools for building Agents around real products and services will look like. It’s like an extension on n8n’s existing capabilities (another agent builder tool) but AgentKit is streamlined around OpenAI’s offering. This could be serendipitous if you’re already leveraging their existing file storage solution or other core features.
The kit is streamlined for building quickly but I don’t really think it’s quite the powerhouse people think it is. We can see why by reviewing some of the other features in the announcement.
ChatKit is an application layer toolkit for delivering a chat interface to end users by directly leveraging ChatGPT’s methodology. It has a nice set of features that manages to do many of the things that the Vercel AI SDK was already doing well. I’m a fan of some of their direction which is clearly inspired by that library.
Similar to building with Swift for the Apple iOS, to leverage this kit a team will be aligning with a design system of visual components created by OpenAI. Until we get a chance to play with these components, it’s unclear how far these components can be pushed and where the limitations are. Additionally, we’ll need to wait and see how this library will evolve over time since this product space is certainly very new.
OpenAI is looking to own more of the experience layer by providing an ecosystem of UX and UI tooling. Applications leveraging their agent platform will need to keep pace with changes and adjust accordingly if they adopt this approach to building. That can be an uncomfortable place to be longterm and might be a worry for early adopters.
OpenAI mentioned that there would be a capability to publish Apps in ChatGPT in the future but no word yet on exactly when. The actual guidelines to publish an app are quite extensive however. They remind me of an Apple App Store-like approval process blocking publishing and becoming featured. Adherence to the style and intent of ChatGPT will be directly rewarded here.
AgentKit doesn’t directly land users into ChatGPT, which can be a bit misleading if you watched the presentation. It seems like AgentKit has everything setup to build something into ChatGPT itself but in actuality AgentKit is for creating agentic experiences on separate company-specific websites.
As OpenAI leans into adopting MCP, there seems to be some underlying messaging that companies don’t have a vendor lock-in around OpenAI. However, the MCP ecosystem is still missing many core services and is still maturing. I’d argue there is a lot of inherent vendor locking with AgentKit. That much is clear.
Evals is one of the most compelling reasons to be excited about AgentKit. But to leverage it well teams will need a very clear vision of what an agent does and what it looks like when it does something well. That continues to be a difficult spot for product builders to define.
Overall, I think AgentKit shows an interesting perspective on what agentic platforms should look like. Unless there’s a clear path towards Apps in ChatGPT I think the main adopters of these releases are going to be B2B application builders. While there’s room for a B2C path, losing brand seems like it lacks competitiveness and limits the upside potential.
Existing options for building agents continue to be available and, given a team with some frontend engineering capability, those solutions aren’t as complex as OpenAI makes it sound.