November 2, 2026 · Ahmed · More by Ahmed
Inside OpenAI's New Agent Session Settings
openai-node 7.46.0 added review, compaction, and time_awareness settings to Agent sessions, here's exactly what each one controls.
review: an opt-in approval gate
OpenAI's openai-node SDK shipped version 7.46.0 on October 31, 2026, adding a review setting to Agent sessions, documented in OpenAI's Agents API sessions reference. It accepts two values: none, which is also what omitting the field gives you, keeps the existing execution behavior with no automatic action review. auto_review reviews eligible actions automatically — and in doing so, denies manual approval fallbacks. The source doesn't define what counts as an "eligible action," so treat this as an on-or-off switch for an automated review layer rather than a tunable policy; teams relying on a manual-approval step for sensitive actions should confirm review isn't silently set to auto_review before assuming that step is still in the loop.
compaction.async: a tradeoff, not a free upgrade
agent.compaction is an object with a single async boolean, and the defaults are easy to misread. Omitting compaction entirely keeps whatever settings a session already has. But supplying the object — even as null or an empty object — enables background compaction, and within that object, omitting or nulling async itself also defaults to true, meaning background. Setting async to false switches to blocking compaction instead. OpenAI's own reference is direct about the cost: background compaction may increase token usage compared to blocking compaction. That's a real tradeoff between turn latency and token spend, not a strictly-better default — a long-running automation agent that's token-cost-sensitive may be better served by blocking compaction, even though background is what an empty object gives you.
time_awareness and swapping tools mid-session
agent.experimental.time_awareness is an optional boolean that gives the model periodic current-time reminders. The parent experimental object defaults to an empty object, so time_awareness is simply absent unless a session explicitly sets it — the source doesn't say what happens to existing sessions by default beyond that.
The same release also added the ability to replace an agent's tool list via agent.tools on a session update: omit it to inherit the current tools, pass null to clear them, or supply a new array to swap in a different tool set without recreating the session. The one hard limit to watch is size — the resolved tool list has to fit within 3 MiB (3,145,728 bytes) of compact UTF-8 JSON, which matters more than it sounds once a session accumulates several MCP servers or a large function catalog.
These four pieces — review, compaction, time_awareness, and the tools update path — shipped together in 7.46.0, the same release that added image-edit markup overlays and organization external key management, among other unrelated changes.