Agent Studio Office Hours – Holiday Edition (The Final One of 2025!)

Hey builders!

We wrapped 2025’s Office Hours series yesterday with a cozy, high-signal session – I was out sick (stay safe from the flu!), so Steve Rankich stepped in as host with Ryan Geroulo riding shotgun. Even with holidays in full swing, the questions were gold – all about making your agents smarter, more reliable, and less noisy.

Here’s the recap of what we unpacked:

1. Available Data Bank Pop-Up – Your New DSL Best Friend 
   → No more hunting through actions to remember output keys! The new “Available Data” modal shows exactly what you can reference: action outputs, slots, and the all the user fields (time zone, employee ID, etc.).
   → Drag-and-drop or copy-paste – instant data.user.time_zone wins. Huge quality-of-life upgrade for chaining actions cleanly.
2. GPT-5.2 Now Live in LLM Actions
   → Fresh model support dropped: GPT-5.2 (pinned & unpinned), plus 5-Mini/Nano/04 flavors.
   → Full reasoning effort control supported, structured JSON generation, summarization – all ready to level up your generative steps.
3. Compound Actions: Sync vs Async Mastery
   → Double confirmations when using compound actions? Our engineering team is working around the clock to fix the “processing → done” noise soon.
   → Pro tip: Toggle “Wait for completion” to make compound actions synchronous (default on). Keep async ones at the end of branches to avoid race conditions.
4. Scheduled Plugins – Set It and Forget It
   → Need recurring tasks (daily reports, weekly cleanups)? Schedule compound actions directly – runs in the background, logs are in the app for easy tracing (up to ~30 days).
   → Perfect for maintenance flows without user triggers.
5. Resources to Bookmark Before the Break
   → Data Retrieval Cookbook = your bible for retrieval patterns.
   → Agent Architect = a copilot for brainstorming flows, DSL, and even Nexthink-style remediation ideas.
   → Steve’s parting wisdom: Lean on these two and you’ll ship faster in 2026.

Massive thanks to everyone who showed up and dropped killer questions – You made this last session of the year super valuable.

Here’s the recording to revisit any part of the session or share it with your agentic team: Recording link