A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Open Responses Gets A Neutral Home, And A Baseline," Kin Lane, October 23, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/23/open-responses-gets-a-neutral-home-and-a-baseline/
Marisol maintained the model gateway at a logistics company, and on Friday afternoon she was the person who translated. Requests came in one shape and went out in three. She had a folder of adapters that nobody else wanted to open.
She read Kin Lane's post on a slow ticket day, mostly out of habit. The first paragraph made her nod. OpenAI had donated Open Responses to the Agentic AI Foundation, which already held MCP, A2A and AGENTS.md. One schema for messages, tool calls and streaming, so you describe a request once. That was her whole job, described as a feature.
Then the numbers made her sit up. She had assumed Responses was the new default. The post said otherwise. Of 120 compatible providers that publish an OpenAPI, 26 declared it. Chat Completions was at 105, and the post called it the de facto standard. She checked her own adapters. Two of the three were still built around chat completions, and she felt slightly caught out.
She did not agree with all of it. The post says a neutral home is the right one, and that a specification under a foundation has a chance to become a standard. Marisol had watched neutral homes before. A charter did not make anyone rewrite an adapter. Her vendors would announce support and then ship it in the second half of next year, if at all. The long support list, Bedrock, Ollama, vLLM and the rest, read to her like a press release. The post seemed to know that. It said that saying you support a specification is the start.
What stayed with her was the line about acceptance tests. The post says that last one "matters more than anything else on the page." She thought about the dozen times a provider had told her it was compatible and she had found out otherwise in production, on a weekend. A published pass or fail would have saved her real hours. She also noticed the discomfort in it. If the tests existed, her own gateway could be graded too, and she was not sure it would pass.
She was also not convinced by the bridge idea. The post worries about two camps with an adapter in the middle, "which is where lock-in lives." She was the adapter in the middle. It stung a little, and she suspected it was fair.
She did not plan a migration. That would have been a fantasy, and her manager would have asked for a business case she did not have. She opened the Open Responses project page instead and found the acceptance tests the post had mentioned.
Then she picked the one provider her team called most and pointed the tests at its endpoint, on her laptop, with nothing in the pipeline. It took twenty minutes to get the thing running. Some of the tests failed. She copied the output into a note titled for Monday, so that when someone asked whether they should care about this, she would have something better than an opinion.