Openai

OpenAI API Skill

Overview

OpenAI provides advanced machine learning models via REST API. This skill covers Chat Completions, Embeddings, and Vision models, focusing on streaming architectures and context management.

Installation

npm install openai
pip install openai

Authentication

Authenticate using a Bearer token (OPENAI_API_KEY). For enterprise organizations, supply the OPENAI_ORG_ID to properly attribute billing.

Core Concepts

• Messages: An array of { role, content } objects representing conversation history.
• Temperature: Controls randomness (0.0 for deterministic, 1.0 for creative).
• Tokens: The atomic unit of billing and context limits.

Common Workflows

1. Construct a system prompt.
2. Append user input to the messages array.
3. Call chat.completions.create with stream: true for low-latency UX.

Error Handling

Catch OpenAIError. Handle RateLimitError (HTTP 429) via exponential backoff. Handle LengthError by dynamically summarizing or trimming the context window before retrying.

Security

Never inject unsanitized user input directly into system prompts to avoid prompt injection attacks. Do not leak API keys in frontend bundles.

Rate Limits

Limits are tiered based on usage. Tier 1 allows 500 RPM for GPT-3.5 and 500 RPM for GPT-4. Tier 5 allows 10,000 RPM.

Best Practices

Use max_tokens defensively to bound costs. Utilize function calling (tools) to ensure the model outputs strictly typed JSON data rather than relying on regex parsing.

Troubleshooting

If you receive 'Context window exceeded', count tokens using tiktoken before sending the request.

References

• API Reference

Why use this skill

Use this when your agent works with openai — structured patterns beat pasted docs and prevent common hallucinations.

AI pitfalls

• Using deprecated model IDs or wrong API endpoints
• Confusing chat vs completions vs embeddings APIs
• Omitting rate-limit and token budget handling

Production checklist

• Secrets in environment variables, not source code
• Error handling and logging in place
• Rate limits and timeouts configured

Related skills

• No graph relationships yet — see the knowledge graph in the docs site.

Last Verified: 2026-07-02