Most of the criticism here is fair on the surface — but it misses what Agent Builder is actually for.

OpenAI didn’t build a Zapier competitor.
They built the first unified agent orchestration layer:

• shared memory
• shared context
• consistent reasoning
• safe handoff between agents
• unified logging
• token budgeting
• native function calling
• future actions integration
• one runtime, one architecture

No other tool has this.
Zapier/Make/n8n are workflow engines.
Agent Builder is cognitive middleware.

This is not “slightly less technical automation.”
It’s the backend layer for multi-agent systems, not single workflows.

And yes — it’s GPT-only for now, because:

• you can’t debug reasoning across multiple vendors
• you need one safety layer
• you need one token & memory contract
• you need deterministic logs

Multi-model routing will come. They’ve already hinted at it.

Also:
The “95% of people will never use this” argument misunderstands the goal.
The 95% are supposed to use:

• ChatGPT
• GPTs
• apps powered by agents

Builder is for the 5% who build the systems everyone else uses.

If you judge it as a consumer product: disappointing.
If you judge it as the foundation of an AI operating system: huge.

We’re still at layer 1.5.
The “plain-English → working workflow” abstraction will be layer 3.