Sora 2 Stole the Show at OpenAI DevDay (www.aiengineering.report)

OpenAI’s DevDay spotlighted Sora 2 and a slate of developer tools that shift generative media and agents from demos toward production. Sora 2 is now available via API (pricing: $0.10/sec for the regular model, $0.30/sec for pro, $0.50/sec for higher-res), and shipped a “storyboarding” workflow that preserves consistent characters, settings, and prompts across clips—solving a key weakness of multi-shot AI video. Early use cases shown ranged from toy-design prototypes to, most plausibly, high-value ad creatives where video quality and consistency matter. The company also unveiled AgentKit/Agent Builder (a visual drag‑and‑drop agent composer backed by an SDK so teams can mix code and no‑code), plus AppKit for embedding apps inside ChatGPT. Those launches both expand OpenAI’s reach beyond pure APIs and blur lines with startups like n8n, Zapier and Gumloop—yet OpenAI notably gave competitors main-stage time (Cursor, Warp), signaling a strategy to grow the ecosystem even while competing. Codex moved to GA, but the coding-agent demos felt less cutting-edge compared to Anthropic’s Sonnet/Claude Code, which remains faster on many tasks. Implications: Sora 2 makes AI video materially more accessible (and monetizable) for production pipelines; AgentKit and AppKit could democratize complex agent apps but also concentrate competitive pressure on startups; and the platform arms race is now about integrated tooling, speed, and developer-to-nontechnical workflows. Bonus: Factory offered 40M free tokens to the top TerminalBench agent (Droid with Sonnet 4.5), a notable promo for benchmarking.