Assistants

Assistants are the persistent version of agents: the system instruction and the tools are stored, and the conversation lives in a thread that the platform maintains. You do not resend the history on every call — you send only the new message.

Assistant, thread, and run

They are three distinct resources, and confusing them is the source of most integration errors:

• Assistant — the configuration: instructions, model, and tools. It lives indefinitely.
• Thread — a conversation. It holds the messages and does not know which assistant will answer it.
• Run — the execution of an assistant over a thread, at a given moment.