OpenAI Just Dropped AgentKit and I Have So Many Questions (But Also, Why Does This Look So Familiar?)

Okay, so OpenAI just announced AgentKit at their Dev Day, and everyone's acting like it's the second coming of automation. Sam Altman got on stage, showed off some demos, and basically promised that we can all build AI agents in our lunch break.

I watched the whole thing while doom-scrolling Twitter reactions (my standard practice for major tech announcements), and I'm... well, let me put it this way: I've seen this movie before, and I didn't love the ending.

What They're Actually Selling Us This Time (Spoiler: It's Recycled)

So AgentKit is supposedly this magical toolkit that lets you build AI agents without being a coding wizard. They packaged together four components that, on paper, sound pretty compelling:

The Agent Builder supposedly works like Canva—drag, drop, connect some boxes, and voilà, you have an AI agent. Christina Huang from OpenAI built two agents in eight minutes during the demo, which is either revolutionary or they picked the world's easiest use case. (I'm definitely leaning toward the latter now.)

Here's where it gets interesting though. Independent industry analysts have been digging into this, and one particularly brutal YouTube breakdown I watched pointed out something hilarious: while competitors like N8n, Zapier, and even Google's new Opal product offer natural language interfaces to build workflows, OpenAI—the company that literally makes the language models—doesn't have this feature. It's like Tesla making a car without autopilot. Make it make sense.

ChatKit is their embeddable interface that lets these agents live on your website while looking like they belong there. Cool in theory, but I've seen enough "seamless integrations" turn into Frankenstein monsters to remain skeptical.

Evals for Agents is their testing system, which—thank god—at least acknowledges that these things need quality control. But here's the kicker: this evaluation feature already existed in their platform for almost a year. They just moved it around and gave it a new paint job. It's like me reorganizing my desk and calling it "productivity innovation."

The Connector Registry promises secure integration with your existing systems. This is the part that makes me most nervous because "secure integration" and "AI accessing my inventory system" feel like phrases that shouldn't go together.

The "Wait, Haven't I Seen This Before?" Problem

So here's where my skepticism goes from healthy to "okay, now I'm actually concerned." Independent analysts have been pointing out that most of AgentKit's features are literally recycled from OpenAI's failed Assistants API—you know, the one they're deprecating because it didn't work out?

The file search capability they're touting? That's been around since 2023 when they launched the Assistants API and promised it would be "the future of AI agents." That future apparently lasted about 12-24 months before they quietly announced they're killing it off.

The vector store for document handling? Same recycled infrastructure that's been gathering dust. They haven't even improved the chunking controls—it's literally the same system with a new UI slapped on top.

One analyst put it perfectly: "I don't hire a plumber to paint my walls and I don't hire a painter to clear my sinks." OpenAI is trying to be everything to everyone, and historically, that's worked out about as well as my attempts to make sourdough during lockdown (RIP to all that wasted flour).

The "This Could Actually Be Useful" Part (With Major Asterisks)

Look, I'm not here to be a total downer. There are theoretically interesting possibilities here for automating the mind-numbing stuff that makes me want to throw my laptop out the window.

Imagine having an AI agent that handles the basic customer service queries—the "where's my order?" and "how do I return this?" messages that flood your inbox every morning. Not replacing your customer service team, but giving them time to handle the actually complex human problems that matter.

Or picture an agent that monitors competitor pricing and alerts you when something significant changes, instead of you manually checking seventeen different marketplaces every morning while your coffee gets cold.

But here's the thing: you can already do this with existing platforms that have been around for years and actually work. N8n, Zapier, Make.com—these platforms have spent years perfecting automation workflows. They're stable, tested, and most importantly, they're not going to suddenly deprecate their core features when the next shiny thing comes along.

The "Hold Your Horses" Reality Check

That eight-minute agent-building demo? I guarantee you that's not accounting for the seventeen hours you'll spend figuring out why it's not working with YOUR specific setup. Plus, according to analysts who've actually tried the platform, the execution monitoring is borderline useless. You can't even click on a node to see what happened—you have to navigate to a completely different page to see execution logs. That's like having to go to a different room every time you want to check if your toast is done.

OpenAI mentioned "launch partners who have already scaled agents" but conveniently didn't name any or share specific use cases. That's like me saying I have a girlfriend in Canada who's a supermodel. Sure, Jan.

And here's the really damning part: the platform only supports OpenAI models. Every other automation platform lets you choose the best model for your specific use case. It's like a restaurant that only serves one type of wine regardless of what you're eating. Sometimes you need Claude, sometimes you need Gemini, and locking yourself into one provider is just asking for trouble.

What This Actually Means for E-commerce Folks Like Us

If you're thinking about jumping into AgentKit, here's my unsolicited advice: don't. At least not yet.

Instead, if you want to explore automation:

1. Learn actual automation platforms that have been around and will continue to be around. N8n, Zapier, Make.com—boring names, but they work.
   

2. Start with proven tools for specific tasks. Need customer service automation? There are specialized platforms for that. Inventory management? Ditto.
   

3. Wait for version 2.0 (or 3.0, or whenever OpenAI actually commits to supporting this long-term).
   

The realistic use cases that you could explore with EXISTING, STABLE platforms:

Customer Service Triage: Plenty of established platforms do this well already.

Price Monitoring: Tools like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel have been doing this for years without the AI hype.

Inventory Alerts: Your existing inventory management system probably already has this feature buried in settings somewhere.

The Bottom Line

OpenAI's AgentKit might eventually become something useful. Or it might join the graveyard of OpenAI's abandoned products alongside the Assistants API and those GPTs we all spent hours building.

The harsh reality? This feels less like innovation and more like OpenAI throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks while they figure out what they actually want to be when they grow up.

Meanwhile, I'll be over here using boring, reliable automation tools that won't suddenly disappear when Sam Altman has his next eureka moment. Because while I love innovation, I love having a functioning business more.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go manually check my competitor's prices for the 47th time this week. Maybe I'll use Zapier to automate it. You know, with a platform that'll still exist next year.

• ChatGPT cites authoritative domains most, led by Reddit and Wikipedia, so use Ahrefs Brand Radar to track and benchmark your brand’s AI visibility.

• Pitch where ChatGPT already looks

• Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads coding and computer use, adds checkpoints, VS Code support, longer running agents, memory tools and an Agent SDK, while keeping Sonnet 4 pricing.

• OpenAI could theoretically power around 7 million digital workers with GPT-5

• Perplexity’s Comet browser is now free with an AI assistant in every tab for research, shopping and email, plus Background Assistants for hands off tasks.

• ChatGPT is shifting from Reddit toward verified sources, boosting reliability and making brand gaming harder.

• OpenAI’s valuation hits $500B after a $6.6B employee share sale, as it ramps partnerships and products despite profit questions.

• ChatGPT usage and adoption at work, who uses it and how do roles shape these patterns.

• Press releases now work as AI visibility engines

• DoorDash unveils Dot, a compact autonomous delivery robot

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• Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses now offer smooth, accurate navigation with Meta AI, aside from a few early bugs, it feels natural and impressively reliable.

📹 Outset - An AI tool that interviews users/candidates with video.

📅 Agenda Hero Magic - Creates AI-generated calendar events

⚠️ Norm AI - Eliminate compliance risks for your business at scale with AI

📸 Visual Electric - An image generator built for the creative process.

💬 CopilotKit - Build in-app AI chatbots and AI-powered text areas

😍It was great, all I needed

🙂Good, not great

🙄It sucked