Until recently, the practice of building AI agents has been a bit like training a long-distance runner with a thirty-second memory. Yes, you could give your AI models tools and instructions, but after a few dozen interactions — several laps around the track, to extend our running analogy — it would inevitably lose context and start hallucinating. With OpenAI’s latest updates to its Responses API — the application programming interface that allows developers on OpenAI’s platform to access multiple agentic tools like web search and file search with a single call — the company is signaling that the era of the limited agent is waning. The updates announced today include Server-side Compaction, Hosted Shell Containers, and a new “Skills” standard for agents.With these three major updates, OpenAI is effectively handing agents a permanent desk, a terminal, and a memory that doesn’t fade and should help agents evolve furhter into reliable, long-term digital workers.Technology: overcoming ‘context amnesia’ The most significant technical hurdle for autonomous agents has always been the “clutter” of long-running tasks. Every time an agent calls a tool or runs a script, the conversation history grows. Eventually, the model hits its token limit, and the developer is forced to truncate the history—often deleting the very “reasoning” the agent needs to finish the job.OpenAI’s answer is Server-side Compaction. Unlike simple truncation, compaction allows agents to run for hours or even days. Early data from e-commerce platform Triple Whale suggests this is a breakthrough in stability: their agent, Moby, successfully navigated a session involving 5 million tokens and 150 tool calls without a drop in accuracy.In practical terms, this means the model can “summarize” its own past actions into a compressed state, keeping the essential context alive while clearing the noise. It transforms the model from a forgetful assistant into a persistent system process.Managed cloud sandboxesThe introduction of the Shell Tool moves OpenAI into the realm of managed compute. D …
