Agent configuration management barely exists as a practice. Ask a team running three AI agents in production where the system prompts live and the honest answer is usually a console text box, a .env file, and somebody's laptop. No diff. No review. No rollback. No record of who changed the instruction that changed the behavior. That is not a criticism of anyone.

Async tool calling went generally available in OpenAI's Responses API on September 3, 2026, alongside mid-turn steering and an opt-in replacement for context compaction in Codex. It received almost none of the coverage that the benchmark table on the same announcement page did. That is the wrong way round. The benchmark numbers describe a model that most organizations cannot access yet.