How to allow clients to visualize the model's thought process as it develops.

[ualers2]

stream_agent_response already emits workflow updates for reasoning summaries, allowing clients to visualize the model's thought process as it unfolds. But how do I integrate this? I haven't seen an example in any documentation.

[tylersmith-openai]

We're working on improve documentation and starter app examples to show how we've instrumented the example chats in https://chatkit.studio/playground. For now, the sad answer is that you sort of need to explore the types and play around with working with Workflow, Task, and ProgressUpdate on your own to see what combinations work best for you.

I'll follow-up here once we have better resources to share for how to work with various thread items.

[weedon-openai]

@ualers2 if you just want to render default reasoning you need to use a reasoning model and opt into reasoning summaries.

Example agent config that should trigger the reasoning item display in ChatKit:

from openai.types.shared import Reasoning
from agents import Agent, ModelSettings

reasoning_agent = Agent[MyAgentContext](
    model="gpt-5-mini",
    model_settings=ModelSettings(
        reasoning=Reasoning(
            summary="auto", # this is probably your missing piece
            effort="medium",
        ),
    ),
    # ...
)

[projectunicorn25]

@weedon-openai Thanks for the explanation on thought summaries! Just to clarify my understanding:

Thought summaries work by setting summary="auto" in the Reasoning configuration, which allows the reasoning model to generate a summary of its internal thought process that gets displayed in the ChatKit UI. This is specifically for reasoning models and shows the model's chain-of-thought.

My follow-up question: Is there also a way to display agent tool calls and progress updates in the UI? For example, when the agent is executing tools or performing actions (similar to how Codex shows tool execution), can we expose that to the user? I'd like to show:

• When the agent calls specific tools
• Progress updates during tool execution
• Results or status from tool calls

Is there a built-in way to surface this information in ChatKit, or would this require custom widget implementation?