“Stainless really shines in owning the building of the SDK.”

Before Stainless, OpenAI didn’t have a dedicated engineer, much less a team, to focus on building world-class SDKs. One engineer spent a month or two creating the foundation of their custom-built Python SDK. Then it became a part-time, shared responsibility to maintain it. The team realized that if they wanted to create SDKs well and have support for multiple languages, they needed full-time engineers to focus on it.

Ideally, OpenAI would like to support as many of the top programming languages as possible, meaning 4-5 SDKs, plus hopefully some of the less common languages. But they knew that would require 2-3 full-time developers to create and maintain. That’s where Stainless became a compelling alternative. OpenAI can now keep engineers dedicated to building the core functionality for their products, instead of distracting them with SDK maintenance.

When OpenAI experimented with building their own custom Python SDK, they ran into unforeseen circumstances. How does a retry work? Does the code work in all the different possible environments? How do you deal with SSL certificate errors if it can’t connect to the server? Stainless SDKs have built-in functionality and expert support to handle these nuanced situations from the start.

Open source SDK generators may work for simple APIs, but OpenAI found there were too many rough edges and features of their complex API that weren’t supported, like streaming chat

Historically, OpenAI had struggled to find time to fix bugs promptly and respond to issues from users. The Stainless team came in proactively addressing those issues and having conversations with end customers on how to improve the SDKs. When you have a million customers, one-in-a-million situations come up all the time—and the Stainless team with their SDKs handle all of them.

Stainless continues to monitor discussions with end customers about how to improve functionality. Using the customer feedback and their expertise, they often make recommendations on how OpenAI can make improvements to their underlying API and benefit all customers.