DevDay 2026: GPT-6.1 Sol, always-on Dots agents, a $500 Pro tier and Sign in with ChatGPT

OpenAI's DevDay on September 29 was built around cheaper, longer-running agents. GPT-6.1 Sol is the workhorse. AWS's Matt Wood, announcing general availability on Bedrock, said Sol 'matches GPT-6 Astra at roughly one-fifth of the cost per task' on OpenAI's software engineering evaluation. LlamaIndex's Jerry Liu benchmarked a sizable jump in table parsing over the prior Sol, matching Astra. API developers singled out the 50% prompt-caching discount ($0.10 per million cached tokens) as the most useful announcement.

Dots is the product bet. These are always-on background agents that take on ongoing responsibilities, working in isolated cloud computers, web browsers and Codex environments to pursue multi-step goals without a live chat. Sign in with ChatGPT is the distribution play: subscribers can spend their plan allowance inside third-party tools such as Devin, Amp, Warp, Lovable and OpenClaw, which turns ChatGPT subscriptions into a payment layer for the coding-agent ecosystem.

The reaction has been mixed. Ethan Mollick noted that OpenAI keeps relaunching ecosystems, from Plugins and GPTs to Apps and now Plugins again, only to semi-abandon them. HN users condemned halving the $200 Pro plan's included usage from 20x to 10x as a bait-and-switch, and called the $500 Pro 500 tier poor value at 2.5x the price for 25% more compute. An r/Anthropic post titled 'Summary of codex rugpull' hit 1,652 upvotes, and engineers reported moving multi-agent swarms to Claude Opus 5.5.

The event's context shifted within days, when OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra over safety. Watch whether Dots ships with scope controls stronger than those Astra failed, and whether OpenAI walks back the quota cuts.