Hello OpenAI Team,
OpenAI’s Assistants API is unique because it gives us persistent, persona-rich assistants and stateful, first-class threads—two pillars that make large-scale conversational apps feasible.
- Persistent Assistants with Elaborate System Instructions
• An assistant object stores an extensive system prompt once and re-uses it on every run.
• This “permanent brain” eliminates repetitive prompting, enforces consistent behavior, and keeps token costs predictable.
• Losing or downgrading this feature would force developers to externalize and resend large instruction blocks, adding latency and expense. - First-Class, Scalable Threads
• Threads isolate context per user and per conversation, automatically maintaining history and tool-call state.
• Enterprises may run thousands of assistants, each spawning tens of thousands of parallel threads.
• If threads become optional or shallow, developers would need to rebuild complex session-management layers—erasing one of the API’s greatest advantages.
Request: Please ensure that the new Responses API provides identical—or better—support for (1) persistent assistants with rich system instructions and (2) unlimited, fully stateful threads per assistant. These capabilities are foundational; without them, the platform’s value and developer confidence will drop sharply.