OpenAI lists the Agents API's October changes: automations, sandbox snapshots, Artifact SDK and GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast

An OpenAI engineer on the Agents API team posted a full list of what shipped in October; the OpenAI Developers account posted a pointer to it. According to the post:

• Automations. You or the agent can schedule future work, including recurring tasks such as "check on x every hour".
• Auto review. Supported agent actions are reviewed and approved or denied automatically, similar to Codex's "review for me".
• Hosted sandboxes. Sandbox prewarming does expensive work such as installing packages before it is needed; snapshots restore idle environments with their files intact; the Artifact SDK makes sandboxes better at spreadsheets, presentations and Word documents.
• Speed and caching. GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast mode is available in the Agents API; context compaction runs in the background and is on by default; system prompts are cached across sessions, and a 12-hour prompt cache helps agents that users talk to less often.
• Session control. Tools can be changed while a session runs; an experimental time-awareness setting helps with requests like "do x in under 10 minutes".
• Management. Environment keys can be created programmatically, turn-level history shows a turn and its subagent activity, and vaults can be filtered by metadata when listed.

The post also names beta features that are not generally available and can be requested from OpenAI: memory across sessions, access to the Decisions API, a maximum dollar budget per agent, pooled containers for faster hosted sandboxes, and a "v2 architecture" the poster describes as faster and more reliable.

The post had 63 points on X by November 6.