OpenAI ‘s introduction of the new GPT-5.1 last week was just a prelude. Now the company has published a key ‘prompting guide’ that signals a strategic shift: from suggestion generation to direct task execution in development environments.
This material, aimed at developers, aims not only to facilitate the migration of existing workflows, but above all to standardise the interaction with the model. OpenAI once again emphasises that the quality of GPT responses is directly dependent on the precision of the monitor design. The new guide formalises techniques to ensure higher accuracy and usability of the generated responses.
A key business concept is the expansion of the ability to create so-called ‘Design Agents’. The documentation describes in detail how developers can now precisely shape the behaviour of a model – defining its tone, personality, response structure or even the expected level of politeness. This is a step towards creating highly specialised, autonomous assistants.
The real innovation, however, is the `apply_patch` tool. It fundamentally changes the role of AI in the software development cycle. Instead of merely suggesting code fragments, GPT-5.1 can now automatically create, update or delete files in the code base by operating on structured diffs.
This feature, integrated directly into the response API, is intended to enable more iterative workflows. According to OpenAI, this approach already reduces failed code changes by 35 per cent. The goal is clear: to encourage developers to use AI as an active tool directly in their IDE environments.
The guide also introduces other advanced features such as ‘metaprompting’, where the model analyses its own prompts for errors, and a shell tool capable of suggesting system commands. The publication of this guide is a clear signal that OpenAI wants its models to become not just a consultant, but an active participant in the software development process.
