OpenAI’s latest developer day revealed a powerful new vision: a unified platform where AI agents could be built in minutes and world-class apps would run directly inside a chat window. The technology was seamless, the business opportunity immense. But for many developers, the demonstration of progress came with a familiar and unwelcome price: the construction of a new digital fortress, with OpenAI as its gatekeeper.
This is Bratislava, the old city quiet under an autumn sky. Inside a glass-walled office overlooking the Danube, a young developer watched the recaps from San Francisco. He saw an engineer build a functioning AI agent in eight minutes, a task that might have taken his team a full quarter. The demonstration was clean, powerful, and fast. The feeling it produced was not joy. It was recognition.
A New Operating System
OpenAI, the company at the center of the world’s attention, had just made its next move. On October 6, it announced “Apps in ChatGPT” and “AgentKit”. The first would allow services like Spotify and Zillow to run directly inside a chat conversation. The second gave developers a visual toolkit to build the complex digital workers they called agents. The message was clear: ChatGPT was no longer just a chatbot. It was becoming an operating system for the internet.
The reaction from the global developer community was immediate, and it was split down the middle. There was awe at the technical execution. Enterprise partners reported stunning results. The fintech firm Ramp testified it could now build in hours what once took months, slashing iteration cycles by 70 percent. The promise of reaching ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users was a powerful lure for businesses large and small. Twitter predicted ChatGPT would become the new default start screen for the workplace.
A Familiar Fear
But beneath the praise was a deep current of skepticism, born from memory. This was OpenAI’s third attempt at building an app store. First came ChatGPT Plugins in March 2023, which saw poor adoption. Then came Custom GPTs in November 2023, which were quietly abandoned. “Remember plugins? Remember GPTs?” became a cynical refrain in developer forums. The pattern bred distrust.
The core fear was lock-in. Developers saw the construction of a new “walled garden,” an ecosystem that was easy to enter but hard to leave. While AgentKit offered convenience, it only worked with OpenAI’s models, trapping users in its orbit. For startups, the threat felt existential. The phrase “OpenAI just killed n8n, Zapier and 1,000 AI startups” became a meme, capturing the anxiety of building a business on a platform that could absorb your function with a single update.
Unanswered Questions
Unanswered questions multiplied. How would user privacy be guarded when conversation histories were shared with third-party apps? How would app discovery work, and would it favor established partners over newcomers? What would stop the platform from becoming a spam trap, or a pay-to-play marketplace where the best placement was sold to the highest bidder?
Across Reddit, Hacker News, and tech blogs, a consensus formed. It was captured in a single phrase: “Solid execution, missing inspiration”. The engineering was impressive, but the vision felt pragmatic, not revolutionary. Compared to previous DevDays that revealed new frontiers in reasoning, this one felt like a consolidation of power—a move focused on enterprise customers and market capture, not on sparking the imagination.
The Strategic Pivot
The story of DevDay 2025 is not about a single technological breakthrough. It is the story of a strategic pivot. OpenAI is transitioning from a company that builds models to a company that owns the platform on which the next generation of software will run. The developer in Bratislava understood this. The question was never whether the tools were good. The question was what it would cost to use them.