OpenAI· Updated
OpenAI updated its prompting guide with GPT-5.4-specific patterns for building reliable AI agents. The guide covers tool use persistence, verification loops, and long-running workflow completeness, giving developers structured contracts for multi-step agent workflows that hold up in production.
GPT-5.4, their latest mainline model. The guide covers four areas: tool use persistence (ensuring agents don't skip prerequisite steps), verification loops (a lightweight check before irreversible actions), structured output contracts (clamping JSON and SQL to exact formats), and completeness rules for long-horizon tasks. It also addresses mid-conversation instruction handling and when to parallelize vs sequence tool calls.This brings developer-level discipline to GPT-5.4 agentic workflows. Agentic tasks break in predictable ways — agents skip steps, fail silently on empty tool results, or drift from format mid-run. The guide gives teams explicit prompt blocks to address each failure mode before they surface in production.
Developers building agents with GPT-5.4 can open the Prompt Guidance page and start with the verification loop, tool persistence, and completeness contract blocks — the patterns OpenAI recommends adding before tuning reasoning effort.
Working with GPT-5.4 in the API? We’ve updated our prompting guide with patterns for reliable agents covering tool use, structured outputs, verification loops, and long-running workflows. https://t.co/lZoZNk0CAk
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