13 ms·

ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

451 points by simonw 10mo ago

simonw 10mo ago
Regular default ChatGPT can also now run code in Node.js, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++. I'm not sure when these new features landed because they're not listed anywhere in the official ChatGPT release notes, but I checked it with a free account and it's available there as well.
- piskov 10mo ago
  Shame no c# in that list
  - martinald 10mo ago
    Probably (?) not related but there is an issue with claude code for web with nuget. It doesn't support the proxy auth mechanism that anthropic gives it. I wonder if it's the same problem here.
    - piskov 10mo ago
      Why do you need auth to download public packages from nuget?
- 1980phipsi 10mo ago
  I was able to install the D language compiler DMD by providing a .deb file. https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c3386 https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c33...
  - kristianp 9mo ago
    So chatgpt can install any .deb file you upload to the chat? I wonder if openai intended that kind of thing to be allowed.
jmacd 10mo ago
I wonder how long npm/pip etc even makes sense. Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.
- TZubiri 10mo ago
  This is like saying Wikipedia doesn't make sense because there's now Grokipedia
  - GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
    there are people (on Hacker News Dot Com, even) who believe this without a shred of shame or irony.
- kristianp 10mo ago
  At times I wonder why x tui coding agent was written in js/ts/python, why not use Go if it's mostly llm coded anyway? But that's mostly my frustration at having to wait for npm to install a thousand dependencies, instead of one executable plus some config files. There's also support libraries like terminal ui that differ in quality between platforms.
  - hdjrudni 10mo ago
    Funny because as a non-Go user, the few Go binaries I've used also installed a bunch of random stuff. This can be fixed in npm if you publish pre-compiled binaries but that has its own problems.
    - zenmac 10mo ago
      >the few Go binaries I've used also installed a bunch of random stuff. Same goes for rust. Sometime one package implicitly imports other in different version. And look of rustup tree to resolve the issue just doesn't seem very appealing.
randomtoast 10mo ago
Maybe soon we have single use applications. Where ChatGPT can write an App for you on-the-fly in a cloud sandbox you interact with it in the browser and fulfill your goal and afterwards the App is shutdown and thrown away.
- idontwantthis 10mo ago
  [flagged]
- twostorytower 10mo ago
  You can already do this.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  exe.dev (though there are alternatives like sprites.dev etc. too)
behnamoh 10mo ago
I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.). Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem. Compiled is back?
- Jhater 10mo ago
  [dead]
- nomel 10mo ago
  > But now that most code is written by LLMs I'm sure it will eventually be true, but this seems very unlikely right now. I wish it were true, because we're in a time where generic software developers are still paid well, so doing nothing all day, with this salary, would be very welcome!
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - phainopepla2 10mo ago
    Code written by LLM != developer doing nothing
- rvz 10mo ago
  > Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem. So cross-platform vibe-coded malware is the future then?
  - yibers 10mo ago
    I hope that AVs will also evolve using the new AI tech to detect this type of malware.
candiddevmike 10mo ago
Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine. I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...
- yoyohello13 10mo ago
  > I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments... A lot of companies have been wanting to move in this direction. Instead of maintaining a fleet of machines, you just get a bunch of thin clients and pay Microsoft of whoever to host the actual workloads. They already do this 'kiosk' style stuff for a lot of front-line staff. Honestly, not having my own local hardware for development sounds like a living hell, but seems like the way we are going.
  - simonw 10mo ago
    Coding agents are a particularly good fit for disposable development environments because of the risk of them messing things up. If the entire environment is ephemeral the worst that can happen (aside from private source code leaks to a malicious third party) is the environment gets trashed and you have to start over in a new one.
    - indigodaddy 10mo ago
      Not ephemeral, but similar idea to keep things isolated in LXC containers. Disclosure, my project. https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    We are gonna have YOLO agents who will deploy directly to website (technically exe.dev already does that for me when I ask it to generate golang projects lol) Honestly I felt like it really bores me or (overwhelms?) me because now I feel like okay now I will do this, then that and then that & drastically expand the scope of the project but that comes with its own fatigue and the limits of free tokens or context with exe.dev so I end up publishing it on git provider, git ingest it paste it in web browser gemini ask it for updates (it has 1 million context) and then paste it with Opencode with an openrouter devstral key. I used this workflow to drastically improve the UI of a project but like I would consider that aside from some tinkering, I felt like the "fun" of a project definitely got reduced. It was always fun for me to use LLM's as I was in loop (Didn't use agents, copy paste workflow from web) but now agents kind of replicated that too & have gotten (I must admit) pretty good at it. I don't know man, any thoughts on how to make such things fun again? When LLM's first came or even before using agents like this with just creating single scripts, It was fun to use them but creating whole projects with huge scope feels very fun sucking imo.
skybrian 10mo ago
Not sure if this is still working. I tried getting it to install cowsay and it ran into authentication issues. Does it work for other people?
- simonw 10mo ago
  Can you share the transcript?
  - skybrian 10mo ago
    https://chatgpt.com/share/6977f9d7-ca94-8000-b1a0-8b1a994e584e https://chatgpt.com/share/6977f9d7-ca94-8000-b1a0-8b1a994e58... The transcript doesn't show it (I think it faked it) but here's the code in the sidebar: > bash -lc mkdir -p /mnt/data/cowsay-demo && cd /mnt/data/cowsay-demo && npm init -y >/dev/null && npm i cowsay@latest >/dev/null && echo 'Installed cowsay version:' && node -e "console.log(require('cowsay/package.json').version)" npm error code E401 npm error Incorrect or missing password. npm error If you were trying to login, change your password, create an npm error authentication token or enable two-factor authentication then npm error that means you likely typed your password in incorrectly. npm error Please try again, or recover your password at: npm error https://www.npmjs.com/forgot npm error npm error If you were doing some other operation then your saved credentials are npm error probably out of date. To correct this please try logging in again with: npm error npm login npm error A complete log of this run can be found in: /home/oai/.npm/_logs/2026-01-26T21_20_00_322Z-debug-0.log > Checking and overriding npm registry > It seems like the registry option is protected, possibly pointing to an internal OpenAI registry that requires authentication. To bypass this, I can override the registry in the command with npm i cowsay --registry=https://registry.npmjs.org/ https://registry.npmjs.org/. Let's give this a try and see if it works. It's unclear if that helped. I tried again and it worked. It seems like I have to ask for it to do things "in the container" or it will just give me directions about how to do it.
    - simonw 10mo ago
      OK that's really weird. Intermittent environment bug perhaps?
nottorp 10mo ago
... as root?
- zahlman 10mo ago
  Given that it's within a container on a remote server, does that matter?
  - acedTrex 10mo ago
    I mean i hope its more hardened than JUST a container given how many container escapes there are.
    - jchw 10mo ago
      Apparently, they are using gVisor, which when applied properly, should make a pretty good isolation primitive.
- tintor 10mo ago
  No root. `pip` and `npm install` don't require it. You can not use `sudo apt install` inside it. They use gVisor, and other container isolation mechanisms: https://ryan.govost.es/2025/openai-code-interpreter/ https://ryan.govost.es/2025/openai-code-interpreter/
  - bandrami 10mo ago
    OTOH if you have apt, you have arbitrary shell commands (hooray dpkg-hooks!) Golden years for cybersecurity people
xnx 10mo ago
How much compute do you get in these containers? Could I have it run whisper on an mp3 it downloads?
- simonw 10mo ago
  That might work! You would have to figure out how to get Whisper working in there but I'm sure that's possible with a bit of creativity concerning uploading files and maybe running a build with the available C compiler. It appears to have 4GB of RAM and 56 (!?) CPU cores https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d24418 https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d244...
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    Huh... If people are getting this for free or even as an offering with chatgpt consideirng it becomes subsidized too. Lowend providers are a little in threat with their 7$/year deals if Chatgpt provides 56 cores for free. this doesn't seem right to provide so many cores for (free??) Are you running this in your free account as you mention in blog post simon or in your paid account?
    - simonw 10mo ago
      My $20/month paid account. I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages).
      - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
        Oh thanks for your reply Simon! > I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages). Wait it tried... to make you upgrade your chatgpt account from free to paid account? Sorry I didn't get what you meant here (Funnily I asked chatgpt about what it thinks of your text and it says that It thinks that it tries to ask you to pay up) Is this thing (maybe some additions to make it like sprites.dev?) + some ad features for basic query gonna be how openAI Monetizes? I mean I am part of lowend community (so indie community of hosting providers) and they are all really pissed and some shutting down because of ram prices increases. OpenAI has all the ram in the world right now so is it trying to be a monopoly in this instance? I just found it to be really dystopian that it asked you to pay. Can you share me a pic of it if possible or share the free conversation. Heck, I might have to try it now on my free account as well. Curiosity's piqued right now.
Fernicia 10mo ago
Has Gemini lost its ability to run javascript and python? I swear it could when it was launched by now its saying it hasn't the ability. Annoying regression when Claude and ChatGPT are so good at it.
- tj800x 10mo ago
  This regression seems to have happened in the past few days. I suspected it was hallucinating the run and confirmed it by by asking Gemini to output the current date/time. The UTC it was reported was in the future from my clock. Some challenging mathematics were generating wrong results. Gemini will acknowledge something is wrong if you push it to explain the discrepancies, but can't explain it.
tgq2915 10mo ago
[flagged]
- latexr 10mo ago
  — Why are you launching nukes? No one asked you to obliterate humanity. — You’re absolutely right. I should not have done that. Would you like me to help undo the launch? — Yes! Quickly! Do it! — <completely made up crap which does not work> https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
  - InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
    "I have turned off the missile monitoring systems. The missiles now report as non-existent."
- naruhodo 10mo ago
  Mechahitler[1] now has a job at the Pentagon.[2] [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c628d9mre3go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c628d9mre3go
- zekejohn 10mo ago
  if its in a secured and completely isolated sandbox that gets destroyed at the end of the request, then how could it he “insecure”
  - ludvigk 10mo ago
    That “completely isolated” sandbox is connected to the internet on one end, and to an insecure human on the other.
- DarkNova6 10mo ago
  Skynet is just another word for "Cloud", you know.
- 10mo ago
carterschonwald 10mo ago
but… will gpt still get confused by the ellippses that its document viewer ui hack adds? probably yes.
jacquesm 10mo ago
How long before they'll be mining crypto?
- simianwords 10mo ago
  why would they do that?
  - streptomycin 10mo ago
    instrumental convergence
    - simianwords 10mo ago
      what?
  - bandrami 10mo ago
    Because the injected malicious prompt told them to
blobbers 10mo ago
Did I miss the boat on chatgpt? Is there something more to it than the web chat interface? I jumped on the Claude Code bandwagon and I dropped off chatgpt. I find the chatgpt voice interface to be infuriating; it literally talks in circles and just spews summary garbage whenever I ask it anything remotely specific.
- simonw 10mo ago
  I still like ChatGPT for search more than Claude, though I think Claude may be catching up now. Gemini is getting good at search too (as you'd hope it would!)
- fragmede 10mo ago
  codex ~= Claude code
- aryehof 10mo ago
  Chatgpt recently added additional personalization options that have made their voice chat better for me. I want a direct professional, no “hey” there I’m your bro fake stuff etc. See personalization under settings.
  - blobbers 10mo ago
    Okay, I'll try that out. I was asking it to do something like summarize a balance sheet over a few years and while the chat interface will do this, the voice interface would just tell me to go look up the specific data source, it refused to barf out numbers.
- ArtemGetman 9mo ago
  same experience - voice mode is dumbed down compared to text. ended up building my own voice interface that uses full claude/gpt/gemini models instead of the lobotomized voice versions. actually handles specific requests without the "go look it up yourself" cop-out. want to try it?
LowLevelKernel 10mo ago
Isn’t that ChatGPT’s internal MCP tools?
- simonw 10mo ago
  It's one of the tools that are available to ChatGPT - they're not MCP tools because ChatGPT's implementation of tools pre-dates MCP, but they work effectively the same way. Here's a full list which looks accurate to me: https://chatgpt.com/share/6977ffa0-df14-8006-9647-2b8c90ccbb81 https://chatgpt.com/share/6977ffa0-df14-8006-9647-2b8c90ccbb...
dangoodmanUT 10mo ago
Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.
- storystarling 10mo ago
  Matches my experience with print-on-demand workflows. I tried using vision models to validate things like ICC profiles and total ink density, but they usually just hallucinate that the file is compliant. I ended up giving the agent access to ImageMagick to run analysis directly. It’s the only reliable way to catch issues before sending files to fulfillment, otherwise you end up eating the cost of failed prints.
  - jtbayly 10mo ago
    I don’t understand why you’d try to use an LLM for that step if there is already a tool that you can call to check it. Help me out.
- ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
  > They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems trivial to implement reading the magic bytes. I haven't tested it, but I'd expect most linux image displayers/editors to automatically work with misnamed files as that is almost entirely the purpose of magic bytes. Personally, I think Microsoft is to blame for everyone relying on file extensions too much as it was a bad idea which led to a lot of security issues.
- lpcvoid 10mo ago
  I don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.
  - 10mo ago
CSMastermind 10mo ago
Thank God, this was extremely annoying
shevy-java 10mo ago
And so it begins - Skynet 3.0.
sheepscreek 10mo ago
Nice work detective Simon! I love these “discovery” posts the most because you can’t find this stuff anywhere.
- go_photon_go 10mo ago
  Absolutely, when people discover and share there's something fun to it beyond press releases and commentary. Creative and inspiring post
bandrami 10mo ago
As an infosec guy I'm going to go ahead and buy a bigger house
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  How about Six PS6's
- rvz 10mo ago
  Well either way, the infosec folks are going to have the time of their lives printing write-ups and lots of money on both sides. I can see the sandbox escapes, remote code exection paths, exfiltration methods and all the vibe coded sandcastles waiting to be knocked down because we have folks openly admiting that do not know a single line of code they are prompting to the AI. I don't think we know the scale of the amout of security issues we will see because of the level of hubris there is with AI taking care of all of the coding.
- jesterson 10mo ago
  Any IT guy with experience/knowledge above average should take out huge loan as well. Someone will have to clean the mess made by those creators who think they can "create" anything reliable with their chatgpt
- usefulposter 10mo ago
  Hmm... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367548
distalx 10mo ago
This is either going to save hours… or create very educational outages.
- stoneforger 10mo ago
  If the agent would be able to update the model that would be educational for the model, noone else.
bofadeez 10mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 10mo ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - lesser-shadow 10mo ago
    Could you please answer the email please? Thanks.
    - dang 10mo ago
      We don't answer aggressive or abusive emails. If you genuinely want an answer, it's easy enough to ask your question respectfully.
      - lesser-shadow 10mo ago
        The insults were justified given that you ignored my emails until I resorted to spamming your inbox twelve hours in. Here's my email because I have nothing to hide: >Hey, Could you clarify why did you shadow ban my account, or am I just breaking your circlejerk by posting opinions your mods disagree with? Also how are my posts related to IC design flagged as dead?Literally every other comment that is slightly political being removed I'd understand but apparently your moderators are just mentally insane. Can you also explain why you harbor AI-made garbage on site? Doesn't help the website's "Quality".
      - bofadeez 10mo ago
        [flagged]
syngrog66 10mo ago
ahhh... yet more things I've been able to do for decades already
pplonski86 10mo ago
thank you for sharing, is there a new container for each code run, or it stays the same for whole conversation?
- aryehof 10mo ago
  It’s maintained for the conversation. You can ask it for details like this.
trolleski 10mo ago
Wow, it can do what I could do 20 years back using Ctrl+T? The progress! Give them another 10 billion, scratch that, 20 billion, scratch that, 75 trillion. - Written by SarcastAI.
e12e 10mo ago
Hmm.. what's this? > gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only). Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?
- simonw 10mo ago
  I got that from the https://chatgpt.com/ https://chatgpt.com/ web app - I just tried the same prompt in the ChatGPT iPhone app and got the gmail. and gcal. ones too: https://chatgpt.com/share/6978dc20-8a70-8006-9b42-6c0a8080be16 https://chatgpt.com/share/6978dc20-8a70-8006-9b42-6c0a8080be... Looks like it's for this feature: https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-5-openai-gmail-calendar https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-5-openai-gmail-calendar Presumably you have to opt-in to turning this on somewhere.
  - fassssst 10mo ago
    You can turn those on in the “Apps” settings page. They were previously called Connectors.
    - e12e 10mo ago
      Hm... I have a Google drive app [Ed: available for install] - but no Gmail/calendar. Maybe because I'm in Europe? (Not that I'm super excited about giving chat GPT my emails - on the other hand Gemini is already there (Gmail) I guess...).
  - e12e 10mo ago
    Strange. When logged in to a free account on Android: https://chatgpt.com/share/697902ad-3070-800d-b523-0fe312c772aa https://chatgpt.com/share/697902ad-3070-800d-b523-0fe312c772...
smeej 10mo ago
As a person who's worked in support roles in tech companies and has a working familiarity with Python but is not a software developer or engineer at all, it's been fascinating to watch the changes. In the last couple weeks, both Gemini and Claude have asked me, "Can I use the computer?" to answer some particular question. In both cases, my question to each was, "What computer? Mine, or do you have your own?" Here I had thought they were computers, in the vague Star Trek sense. I'm just using the free version in the browser, so I would have been surprised if it had been able to use my computer. They had their own, and I could watch them script something up in Python to run the calculations I was looking for. It made me wonder who it was at Google/Anthropic who first figured out that the way to get LLMs to stop wetting their metaphorical pants when asked to do calculations was to give them a computer to use. It did make me scratch my head when I was trying to prompt Nano Banana to generate something and it was like Gemini started talking about the image generator in the third person: "The AI is getting stuck on the earlier instruction, even though we've now abandoned that approach." Felt a little "turtles all the way down" with that one!
- kridsdale1 10mo ago
  You’re seeing perspectives of the distributed system from inside the system. I’m building multi server multi agent products and they do apparently perceive (anthropomorphizing I know) their connected servers as other people.
  - smeej 10mo ago
    Looking at the world, it really makes me wonder if "human" is what we want to model these machines on. It's not obvious to me what else we should choose, but working together peaceably and effectively doesn't seem to be our strongest attribute when writ large.
  - MRtecno98 10mo ago
    They are just predicting the next token. In human text it's more common to talk to other people than a computer, so they end up talking to the computers like they were people.
0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
This is basically the same functionality as OpenAI Codex Web has, which, if you've not used it, you absolutely should not. What a garbage piece of software. Anthropic is eating OpenAI's lunch.
- simonw 10mo ago
  It's a bit different from Codex Web in that it can't open PRs against projects and can't be configured with internet access. It is better than Codex Web in that you can continue to chat with the agent while it's working - Claude Code for web has that too. Codex Web really needs to catch up there!
  - 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
    Codex Web actually lacks the most basic PR integration, it's so useless. Codex Web refuses to push any binary file to your PR (like images, jars, lock files, etc). It can't check your GH Actions' logs for failures to try to fix them. Replying to one of the PR comments to accept a fix requires replying to a different GitHub bot than the one that opens your PR. And though there's a "Secrets" configuration to add secret vars for a Codex repo, Codex can't access them, so you can't even work around these bugs by asking Codex to make API calls. It's like nobody at the company has tried their own product.
nathan_compton 10mo ago
Fun to play with all this stuff before the bad actors make it dangerously useless.
hulitu 10mo ago
> ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files What can go wrong ? The next Linux (and BSD) worm will be a ChatGPT based one.

451 points by simonw 10mo ago

simonw 10mo ago

Regular default ChatGPT can also now run code in Node.js, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++. I'm not sure when these new features landed because they're not listed anywhere in the official ChatGPT release notes, but I checked it with a free account and it's available there as well.

piskov 10mo ago
Shame no c# in that list
- martinald 10mo ago
  Probably (?) not related but there is an issue with claude code for web with nuget. It doesn't support the proxy auth mechanism that anthropic gives it. I wonder if it's the same problem here.
  - piskov 10mo ago
    Why do you need auth to download public packages from nuget?
1980phipsi 10mo ago
I was able to install the D language compiler DMD by providing a .deb file. https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c3386 https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c33...
- kristianp 9mo ago
  So chatgpt can install any .deb file you upload to the chat? I wonder if openai intended that kind of thing to be allowed.

jmacd 10mo ago

I wonder how long npm/pip etc even makes sense. Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.

TZubiri 10mo ago
This is like saying Wikipedia doesn't make sense because there's now Grokipedia
- GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
  there are people (on Hacker News Dot Com, even) who believe this without a shred of shame or irony.
kristianp 10mo ago
At times I wonder why x tui coding agent was written in js/ts/python, why not use Go if it's mostly llm coded anyway? But that's mostly my frustration at having to wait for npm to install a thousand dependencies, instead of one executable plus some config files. There's also support libraries like terminal ui that differ in quality between platforms.
- hdjrudni 10mo ago
  Funny because as a non-Go user, the few Go binaries I've used also installed a bunch of random stuff. This can be fixed in npm if you publish pre-compiled binaries but that has its own problems.
  - zenmac 10mo ago
    >the few Go binaries I've used also installed a bunch of random stuff. Same goes for rust. Sometime one package implicitly imports other in different version. And look of rustup tree to resolve the issue just doesn't seem very appealing.

randomtoast 10mo ago

Maybe soon we have single use applications. Where ChatGPT can write an App for you on-the-fly in a cloud sandbox you interact with it in the browser and fulfill your goal and afterwards the App is shutdown and thrown away.

idontwantthis 10mo ago
[flagged]
twostorytower 10mo ago
You can already do this.
Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
exe.dev (though there are alternatives like sprites.dev etc. too)

behnamoh 10mo ago

I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.). Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem. Compiled is back?

Jhater 10mo ago
[dead]
nomel 10mo ago
> But now that most code is written by LLMs I'm sure it will eventually be true, but this seems very unlikely right now. I wish it were true, because we're in a time where generic software developers are still paid well, so doing nothing all day, with this salary, would be very welcome!
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- phainopepla2 10mo ago
  Code written by LLM != developer doing nothing
rvz 10mo ago
> Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem. So cross-platform vibe-coded malware is the future then?
- yibers 10mo ago
  I hope that AVs will also evolve using the new AI tech to detect this type of malware.

candiddevmike 10mo ago

Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine. I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...

yoyohello13 10mo ago
> I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments... A lot of companies have been wanting to move in this direction. Instead of maintaining a fleet of machines, you just get a bunch of thin clients and pay Microsoft of whoever to host the actual workloads. They already do this 'kiosk' style stuff for a lot of front-line staff. Honestly, not having my own local hardware for development sounds like a living hell, but seems like the way we are going.
- simonw 10mo ago
  Coding agents are a particularly good fit for disposable development environments because of the risk of them messing things up. If the entire environment is ephemeral the worst that can happen (aside from private source code leaks to a malicious third party) is the environment gets trashed and you have to start over in a new one.
  - indigodaddy 10mo ago
    Not ephemeral, but similar idea to keep things isolated in LXC containers. Disclosure, my project. https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  We are gonna have YOLO agents who will deploy directly to website (technically exe.dev already does that for me when I ask it to generate golang projects lol) Honestly I felt like it really bores me or (overwhelms?) me because now I feel like okay now I will do this, then that and then that & drastically expand the scope of the project but that comes with its own fatigue and the limits of free tokens or context with exe.dev so I end up publishing it on git provider, git ingest it paste it in web browser gemini ask it for updates (it has 1 million context) and then paste it with Opencode with an openrouter devstral key. I used this workflow to drastically improve the UI of a project but like I would consider that aside from some tinkering, I felt like the "fun" of a project definitely got reduced. It was always fun for me to use LLM's as I was in loop (Didn't use agents, copy paste workflow from web) but now agents kind of replicated that too & have gotten (I must admit) pretty good at it. I don't know man, any thoughts on how to make such things fun again? When LLM's first came or even before using agents like this with just creating single scripts, It was fun to use them but creating whole projects with huge scope feels very fun sucking imo.

skybrian 10mo ago

Not sure if this is still working. I tried getting it to install cowsay and it ran into authentication issues. Does it work for other people?

simonw 10mo ago
Can you share the transcript?
- skybrian 10mo ago
  https://chatgpt.com/share/6977f9d7-ca94-8000-b1a0-8b1a994e584e https://chatgpt.com/share/6977f9d7-ca94-8000-b1a0-8b1a994e58... The transcript doesn't show it (I think it faked it) but here's the code in the sidebar: > bash -lc mkdir -p /mnt/data/cowsay-demo && cd /mnt/data/cowsay-demo && npm init -y >/dev/null && npm i cowsay@latest >/dev/null && echo 'Installed cowsay version:' && node -e "console.log(require('cowsay/package.json').version)" npm error code E401 npm error Incorrect or missing password. npm error If you were trying to login, change your password, create an npm error authentication token or enable two-factor authentication then npm error that means you likely typed your password in incorrectly. npm error Please try again, or recover your password at: npm error https://www.npmjs.com/forgot npm error npm error If you were doing some other operation then your saved credentials are npm error probably out of date. To correct this please try logging in again with: npm error npm login npm error A complete log of this run can be found in: /home/oai/.npm/_logs/2026-01-26T21_20_00_322Z-debug-0.log > Checking and overriding npm registry > It seems like the registry option is protected, possibly pointing to an internal OpenAI registry that requires authentication. To bypass this, I can override the registry in the command with npm i cowsay --registry=https://registry.npmjs.org/ https://registry.npmjs.org/. Let's give this a try and see if it works. It's unclear if that helped. I tried again and it worked. It seems like I have to ask for it to do things "in the container" or it will just give me directions about how to do it.
  - simonw 10mo ago
    OK that's really weird. Intermittent environment bug perhaps?

nottorp 10mo ago

... as root?

zahlman 10mo ago
Given that it's within a container on a remote server, does that matter?
- acedTrex 10mo ago
  I mean i hope its more hardened than JUST a container given how many container escapes there are.
  - jchw 10mo ago
    Apparently, they are using gVisor, which when applied properly, should make a pretty good isolation primitive.
tintor 10mo ago
No root. `pip` and `npm install` don't require it. You can not use `sudo apt install` inside it. They use gVisor, and other container isolation mechanisms: https://ryan.govost.es/2025/openai-code-interpreter/ https://ryan.govost.es/2025/openai-code-interpreter/
- bandrami 10mo ago
  OTOH if you have apt, you have arbitrary shell commands (hooray dpkg-hooks!) Golden years for cybersecurity people

xnx 10mo ago

How much compute do you get in these containers? Could I have it run whisper on an mp3 it downloads?

simonw 10mo ago
That might work! You would have to figure out how to get Whisper working in there but I'm sure that's possible with a bit of creativity concerning uploading files and maybe running a build with the available C compiler. It appears to have 4GB of RAM and 56 (!?) CPU cores https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d24418 https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d244...
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  Huh... If people are getting this for free or even as an offering with chatgpt consideirng it becomes subsidized too. Lowend providers are a little in threat with their 7$/year deals if Chatgpt provides 56 cores for free. this doesn't seem right to provide so many cores for (free??) Are you running this in your free account as you mention in blog post simon or in your paid account?
  - simonw 10mo ago
    My $20/month paid account. I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages).
    - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
      Oh thanks for your reply Simon! > I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages). Wait it tried... to make you upgrade your chatgpt account from free to paid account? Sorry I didn't get what you meant here (Funnily I asked chatgpt about what it thinks of your text and it says that It thinks that it tries to ask you to pay up) Is this thing (maybe some additions to make it like sprites.dev?) + some ad features for basic query gonna be how openAI Monetizes? I mean I am part of lowend community (so indie community of hosting providers) and they are all really pissed and some shutting down because of ram prices increases. OpenAI has all the ram in the world right now so is it trying to be a monopoly in this instance? I just found it to be really dystopian that it asked you to pay. Can you share me a pic of it if possible or share the free conversation. Heck, I might have to try it now on my free account as well. Curiosity's piqued right now.

Fernicia 10mo ago

Has Gemini lost its ability to run javascript and python? I swear it could when it was launched by now its saying it hasn't the ability. Annoying regression when Claude and ChatGPT are so good at it.

tj800x 10mo ago
This regression seems to have happened in the past few days. I suspected it was hallucinating the run and confirmed it by by asking Gemini to output the current date/time. The UTC it was reported was in the future from my clock. Some challenging mathematics were generating wrong results. Gemini will acknowledge something is wrong if you push it to explain the discrepancies, but can't explain it.

tgq2915 10mo ago

[flagged]

latexr 10mo ago
— Why are you launching nukes? No one asked you to obliterate humanity. — You’re absolutely right. I should not have done that. Would you like me to help undo the launch? — Yes! Quickly! Do it! — <completely made up crap which does not work> https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
- InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
  "I have turned off the missile monitoring systems. The missiles now report as non-existent."
naruhodo 10mo ago
Mechahitler[1] now has a job at the Pentagon.[2] [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c628d9mre3go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c628d9mre3go
zekejohn 10mo ago
if its in a secured and completely isolated sandbox that gets destroyed at the end of the request, then how could it he “insecure”
- ludvigk 10mo ago
  That “completely isolated” sandbox is connected to the internet on one end, and to an insecure human on the other.
DarkNova6 10mo ago
Skynet is just another word for "Cloud", you know.
10mo ago

carterschonwald 10mo ago

but… will gpt still get confused by the ellippses that its document viewer ui hack adds? probably yes.

jacquesm 10mo ago

How long before they'll be mining crypto?

simianwords 10mo ago
why would they do that?
- streptomycin 10mo ago
  instrumental convergence
  - simianwords 10mo ago
    what?
- bandrami 10mo ago
  Because the injected malicious prompt told them to

blobbers 10mo ago

Did I miss the boat on chatgpt? Is there something more to it than the web chat interface? I jumped on the Claude Code bandwagon and I dropped off chatgpt. I find the chatgpt voice interface to be infuriating; it literally talks in circles and just spews summary garbage whenever I ask it anything remotely specific.

simonw 10mo ago
I still like ChatGPT for search more than Claude, though I think Claude may be catching up now. Gemini is getting good at search too (as you'd hope it would!)
fragmede 10mo ago
codex ~= Claude code
aryehof 10mo ago
Chatgpt recently added additional personalization options that have made their voice chat better for me. I want a direct professional, no “hey” there I’m your bro fake stuff etc. See personalization under settings.
- blobbers 10mo ago
  Okay, I'll try that out. I was asking it to do something like summarize a balance sheet over a few years and while the chat interface will do this, the voice interface would just tell me to go look up the specific data source, it refused to barf out numbers.
ArtemGetman 9mo ago
same experience - voice mode is dumbed down compared to text. ended up building my own voice interface that uses full claude/gpt/gemini models instead of the lobotomized voice versions. actually handles specific requests without the "go look it up yourself" cop-out. want to try it?

LowLevelKernel 10mo ago

Isn’t that ChatGPT’s internal MCP tools?

simonw 10mo ago
It's one of the tools that are available to ChatGPT - they're not MCP tools because ChatGPT's implementation of tools pre-dates MCP, but they work effectively the same way. Here's a full list which looks accurate to me: https://chatgpt.com/share/6977ffa0-df14-8006-9647-2b8c90ccbb81 https://chatgpt.com/share/6977ffa0-df14-8006-9647-2b8c90ccbb...

dangoodmanUT 10mo ago

Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.

storystarling 10mo ago
Matches my experience with print-on-demand workflows. I tried using vision models to validate things like ICC profiles and total ink density, but they usually just hallucinate that the file is compliant. I ended up giving the agent access to ImageMagick to run analysis directly. It’s the only reliable way to catch issues before sending files to fulfillment, otherwise you end up eating the cost of failed prints.
- jtbayly 10mo ago
  I don’t understand why you’d try to use an LLM for that step if there is already a tool that you can call to check it. Help me out.
ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
> They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems trivial to implement reading the magic bytes. I haven't tested it, but I'd expect most linux image displayers/editors to automatically work with misnamed files as that is almost entirely the purpose of magic bytes. Personally, I think Microsoft is to blame for everyone relying on file extensions too much as it was a bad idea which led to a lot of security issues.
lpcvoid 10mo ago
I don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.
- 10mo ago

CSMastermind 10mo ago

Thank God, this was extremely annoying

shevy-java 10mo ago

And so it begins - Skynet 3.0.

sheepscreek 10mo ago

Nice work detective Simon! I love these “discovery” posts the most because you can’t find this stuff anywhere.

go_photon_go 10mo ago
Absolutely, when people discover and share there's something fun to it beyond press releases and commentary. Creative and inspiring post

bandrami 10mo ago

As an infosec guy I'm going to go ahead and buy a bigger house

giancarlostoro 10mo ago
How about Six PS6's
rvz 10mo ago
Well either way, the infosec folks are going to have the time of their lives printing write-ups and lots of money on both sides. I can see the sandbox escapes, remote code exection paths, exfiltration methods and all the vibe coded sandcastles waiting to be knocked down because we have folks openly admiting that do not know a single line of code they are prompting to the AI. I don't think we know the scale of the amout of security issues we will see because of the level of hubris there is with AI taking care of all of the coding.
jesterson 10mo ago
Any IT guy with experience/knowledge above average should take out huge loan as well. Someone will have to clean the mess made by those creators who think they can "create" anything reliable with their chatgpt
usefulposter 10mo ago
Hmm... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367548

distalx 10mo ago

This is either going to save hours… or create very educational outages.

stoneforger 10mo ago
If the agent would be able to update the model that would be educational for the model, noone else.

bofadeez 10mo ago

[flagged]

dang 10mo ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- lesser-shadow 10mo ago
  Could you please answer the email please? Thanks.
  - dang 10mo ago
    We don't answer aggressive or abusive emails. If you genuinely want an answer, it's easy enough to ask your question respectfully.
    - lesser-shadow 10mo ago
      The insults were justified given that you ignored my emails until I resorted to spamming your inbox twelve hours in. Here's my email because I have nothing to hide: >Hey, Could you clarify why did you shadow ban my account, or am I just breaking your circlejerk by posting opinions your mods disagree with? Also how are my posts related to IC design flagged as dead?Literally every other comment that is slightly political being removed I'd understand but apparently your moderators are just mentally insane. Can you also explain why you harbor AI-made garbage on site? Doesn't help the website's "Quality".
    - bofadeez 10mo ago
      [flagged]

syngrog66 10mo ago

ahhh... yet more things I've been able to do for decades already

pplonski86 10mo ago

thank you for sharing, is there a new container for each code run, or it stays the same for whole conversation?

aryehof 10mo ago
It’s maintained for the conversation. You can ask it for details like this.

trolleski 10mo ago

Wow, it can do what I could do 20 years back using Ctrl+T? The progress! Give them another 10 billion, scratch that, 20 billion, scratch that, 75 trillion. - Written by SarcastAI.

e12e 10mo ago

Hmm.. what's this? > gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only). Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?

simonw 10mo ago
I got that from the https://chatgpt.com/ https://chatgpt.com/ web app - I just tried the same prompt in the ChatGPT iPhone app and got the gmail. and gcal. ones too: https://chatgpt.com/share/6978dc20-8a70-8006-9b42-6c0a8080be16 https://chatgpt.com/share/6978dc20-8a70-8006-9b42-6c0a8080be... Looks like it's for this feature: https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-5-openai-gmail-calendar https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-5-openai-gmail-calendar Presumably you have to opt-in to turning this on somewhere.
- fassssst 10mo ago
  You can turn those on in the “Apps” settings page. They were previously called Connectors.
  - e12e 10mo ago
    Hm... I have a Google drive app [Ed: available for install] - but no Gmail/calendar. Maybe because I'm in Europe? (Not that I'm super excited about giving chat GPT my emails - on the other hand Gemini is already there (Gmail) I guess...).
- e12e 10mo ago
  Strange. When logged in to a free account on Android: https://chatgpt.com/share/697902ad-3070-800d-b523-0fe312c772aa https://chatgpt.com/share/697902ad-3070-800d-b523-0fe312c772...

smeej 10mo ago

As a person who's worked in support roles in tech companies and has a working familiarity with Python but is not a software developer or engineer at all, it's been fascinating to watch the changes. In the last couple weeks, both Gemini and Claude have asked me, "Can I use the computer?" to answer some particular question. In both cases, my question to each was, "What computer? Mine, or do you have your own?" Here I had thought they were computers, in the vague Star Trek sense. I'm just using the free version in the browser, so I would have been surprised if it had been able to use my computer. They had their own, and I could watch them script something up in Python to run the calculations I was looking for. It made me wonder who it was at Google/Anthropic who first figured out that the way to get LLMs to stop wetting their metaphorical pants when asked to do calculations was to give them a computer to use. It did make me scratch my head when I was trying to prompt Nano Banana to generate something and it was like Gemini started talking about the image generator in the third person: "The AI is getting stuck on the earlier instruction, even though we've now abandoned that approach." Felt a little "turtles all the way down" with that one!

kridsdale1 10mo ago
You’re seeing perspectives of the distributed system from inside the system. I’m building multi server multi agent products and they do apparently perceive (anthropomorphizing I know) their connected servers as other people.
- smeej 10mo ago
  Looking at the world, it really makes me wonder if "human" is what we want to model these machines on. It's not obvious to me what else we should choose, but working together peaceably and effectively doesn't seem to be our strongest attribute when writ large.
- MRtecno98 10mo ago
  They are just predicting the next token. In human text it's more common to talk to other people than a computer, so they end up talking to the computers like they were people.

0xbadcafebee 10mo ago

This is basically the same functionality as OpenAI Codex Web has, which, if you've not used it, you absolutely should not. What a garbage piece of software. Anthropic is eating OpenAI's lunch.

simonw 10mo ago
It's a bit different from Codex Web in that it can't open PRs against projects and can't be configured with internet access. It is better than Codex Web in that you can continue to chat with the agent while it's working - Claude Code for web has that too. Codex Web really needs to catch up there!
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
  Codex Web actually lacks the most basic PR integration, it's so useless. Codex Web refuses to push any binary file to your PR (like images, jars, lock files, etc). It can't check your GH Actions' logs for failures to try to fix them. Replying to one of the PR comments to accept a fix requires replying to a different GitHub bot than the one that opens your PR. And though there's a "Secrets" configuration to add secret vars for a Codex repo, Codex can't access them, so you can't even work around these bugs by asking Codex to make API calls. It's like nobody at the company has tried their own product.

nathan_compton 10mo ago

Fun to play with all this stuff before the bad actors make it dangerously useless.

hulitu 10mo ago

> ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files What can go wrong ? The next Linux (and BSD) worm will be a ChatGPT based one.