Handoffs in OpenAI Agents SDK

Now that we understand the different orchestration methods with multi-agent systems, let’s discuss the constructs that are available to us in OpenAI Agents SDK that make this possible. One of the most important primitives that the SDK provides is handoffs.

A handoff is the mechanism by which an agent can pass control to another agent. It’s equivalent to an agent saying, “I’m going to hand over this task to you. You can answer it better than I. Here are all the details.” Handoffs are required in multi-agent systems as it’s the layer that connects different agents together.

Note

There are generally two ways for agents to interact with each other, one of which we have already covered in great detail within Chapter 4, called as_tool().

The as_tool() function enables an agent to become a tool that can be added to another agent. Think of it as calling a helper function: the main agent remains...