Overview
The OpenAI Cookbook (openai/openai-cookbook) is a curated collection of example code, how-tos, and best-practice recipes for working with the OpenAI API. Maintained by OpenAI, the repository aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers, researchers, and engineers by demonstrating concrete, reproducible patterns for common tasks when building applications with large language models and other OpenAI services.
What it contains
- Practical code snippets and notebooks (primarily Python) that demonstrate API usage and common patterns.
- Recipes for prompt engineering (structured prompts, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought prompts), output parsing, and safety-handling strategies.
- Examples for embeddings and vector search workflows (creating embeddings, storing/retrieving vectors, RAG setups).
- Guides for image generation and multimodal usage where applicable.
- How-to guides for fine-tuning, streaming responses, rate-limiting considerations, and integrating the API into production systems.
- Links to related resources, demos, and community-maintained examples.
How to use
- Visit the repository or the hosted site (https://cookbook.openai.com) to browse recipes.
- Follow repository instructions to set an OPENAI_API_KEY and run example notebooks or scripts.
- Copy and adapt recipes to fit your application: the cookbook emphasizes small, focused examples that can be composed into larger pipelines.
Audience and value
The cookbook is intended for developers, data scientists, and engineers who want working examples rather than theoretical descriptions. It is particularly useful for:
- Rapid prototyping of LLM-powered features.
- Learning prompt patterns and pragmatic engineering techniques.
- Discovering safe and production-aware patterns (e.g., parsing, rate limiting, and content filtering).
Community, license and maintenance
- The project is open-source under the MIT License, allowing reuse and adaptation.
- It includes links to related resources and encourages contributions via GitHub issues and pull requests.
- The repository pairs concise examples with explanatory text so users can both copy working code and understand the rationale behind patterns.
Notable details
- Official hosted documentation site: https://cookbook.openai.com.
- Created to be a living collection: recipes are added and improved over time to reflect best practices for using the OpenAI API.
