OpenAI learned from its "Plugins" product that developers need control over their brand and user experience. The new Apps SDK allows custom UI components inside ChatGPT, a direct response to feedback that Plugins offered too little control, binding developers too tightly to the standard chat interface.

The idea of a truly "open web" was a brief historical moment. Powerful, proprietary "organizing layers" like search engines and app stores inevitably emerge to centralize ecosystems and capture value. Today's AI chatbots are simply the newest form of these organizing layers.

The core technology behind ChatGPT was available to developers for two years via the GPT-3 API. Its explosive adoption wasn't due to a sudden technical leap but to a simple, accessible UI, proving that distribution and user experience can be as disruptive as the underlying invention.

The best UI for an AI tool is a direct function of the underlying model's power. A more capable model unlocks more autonomous 'form factors.' For example, the sudden rise of CLI agents was only possible once models like Claude 3 became capable enough to reliably handle multi-step tasks.

In a significant strategic move, OpenAI's Evals product within Agent Kit allows developers to test results from non-OpenAI models via integrations like Open Router. This positions Agent Kit not just as an OpenAI-centric tool, but as a central, model-agnostic platform for building and optimizing agents.

Open-ended prompts overwhelm new users who don't know what's possible. A better approach is to productize AI into specific features. Use familiar UI like sliders and dropdowns to gather user intent, which then constructs a complex prompt behind the scenes, making powerful AI accessible without requiring prompt engineering skills.

The most effective application of AI isn't a visible chatbot feature. It's an invisible layer that intelligently removes friction from existing user workflows. Instead of creating new work for users (like prompt engineering), AI should simplify experiences, like automatically surfacing a 'pay bill' link without the user ever consciously 'using AI.'

Using a composable, 'plug and play' architecture allows teams to build specialized AI agents faster and with less overhead than integrating a monolithic third-party tool. This approach enables the creation of lightweight, tailored solutions for niche use cases without the complexity of external API integrations, containing the entire workflow within one platform.

Chatbots are fundamentally linear, which is ill-suited for complex tasks like planning a trip. The next generation of AI products will use AI as a co-creation tool within a more flexible canvas-like interface, allowing users to manipulate and organize AI-generated content non-linearly.