OpenAI Agent Skills & Shell: Master Enterprise AI Workflows with New Primitives

Abstract OpenAI’s new agentic primitives—Skills for standardized workflows, an upgraded Shell tool for enterprise execution, and server-side compaction—transform how developers build reliable long-horizon AI systems. By encapsulating operations in reusable Skills, enabling containerized execution with strict network controls, and automatically managing context limits, these tools address key bottlenecks in real-world knowledge work. Case studies show measurable improvements in accuracy (e.g., Glean’s 85% vs. 73% baseline) and operational efficiency. 1. Overcoming Challenges in Long-Running Tasks 1.1 Key Pain Points Traditional single-turn interactions struggle with: Context Limitations: API constraints restricting ~4k tokens (≈3,000 Chinese characters) per request. State Fragility: Multi-step processes require …