Built-in Support for Sticky Session Routing / Direct Agent Handoff

[Mukish45]

In multi-agent conversational systems, it is often necessary to "lock" a conversation to a specific sub-agent after an initial routing decision, and keep routing all subsequent messages in that session directly to the same agent until an explicit reset/exit condition (e.g., user says "new task") is met. This is commonly referred to as a "sticky session" or "direct handoff" pattern.

Currently, the OpenAI Agent SDK does not provide out-of-the-box support for this routing mode:

• Each new user input is routed from scratch or requires custom logic for persistent handoff
• There is no built-in way to lock a session to a specific agent until a reset condition occurs

Desired Solution:
Provide an easy mechanism (e.g., an option or helper class) to enable sticky sessions, where the SDK will automatically direct all messages to the selected sub-agent after the initial routing, restoring control to the main router only on reset.

This pattern would reduce repetitive routing, improve continuity, and enable deeper multi-turn workflows with a single agent.

[seratch]

Hi, thanks for writing in. We recommend using sessions feature for this use case: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/sessions/

I don't plan to add sticky-session-ish features to this SDK, so please consider using the sessions store to enable round-robin routing to any of your running app instances. The sessions feature provides only SQLite implementation at this moment, but we will come up with a few more built-in ones in the future.

Hope this clarifies things. Since we don't have further actions for this topic, let me close this issue now. If you have any follow-up comments/questions, please feel free to write in.