6 ms·

Understanding ChatGPT Work

352 points by gmays 2mo ago

hirak10 2mo ago
[flagged]
Kuinox 2mo ago
There is more to the browser, it can give you a remote desktop access to the browser. So it's not completely headless. But when I tried it, the remote control completely froze after a few seconds.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
paytonjjones 2mo ago
> I believe ChatGPT Work sessions are billed against your Codex allowance, while ChatGPT Chat Sessions get their own, separate allowance. This may help explain the model availability differences That's correct, and also why ChatGPT Work is DOA for me personally. I need 100% of my Codex budget for Codex. Too bad, it would have been nice to have a few extra features for the chat interface.
- saithound 2mo ago
  If we voice this opinion publicly, the most likely end result is that OpenAI will start billing our chat sessioms against our Codex budget too.
  - arcanemachiner 2mo ago
    I thought they just did this? People were using some loophole to use their Chat sessions to power their Codex usage after their Codex quotas had run out.
    - paytonjjones 2mo ago
      No, it's still separate. I don't know what that exploit was though, so possibly they just patched that.
- skybrian 2mo ago
  Similarly, I use my budget with Shelley on exe.dev. But it seems nice that as far as I can tell, for ChatGPT usage, coding agents compete on a level footing. I still might try ChatGPT Work sometime if there was some feature I couldn't get from Shelley.
tristanj 2mo ago
I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder", it just asks for the relevant info and handles the rest. It opens its internal web browser and programmatically fills out the forms. It gets the task done in 5-10 minutes. It's it bit slow since I'm not paying extra for ultrafast mode, but it gets the job done. Frees up the brain to do other tasks. It's exactly like vibe coding but for computer tasks.
- wpasc 2mo ago
  agreed on the notion that > people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex just in general. I find it to be far superior (imo) for all tasks atm. Claude just overdoes things in writing, coding, architecture, etc
- ValentineC 2mo ago
  > "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder" It's both awesome and scary at the same time to realising that most AI these days can work on something like this that's official and tedious, and probably not screw up too much (or do better at it than some people with fat fingers).
  - alansaber 2mo ago
    Less bureaucracy should be the focus of AI marketing, rather than global superintelligent robots or smut generation
    - cwmoore 2mo ago
      Lets just not redo subscription gods
    - bushbaba 2mo ago
AmazingEveryDay 2mo ago
[flagged]
- arcanemachiner 2mo ago
  If it makes you feel any better, I have just upvoted every submission made by your account.
  - weedfroglozenge 2mo ago
    I mean he is kind of speaking truth. Anything Simon posts seems to get upvoted and this article is nothing special or interesting. It's like a tutorial for a feature of a ChatGPT subscription.... Cool.
    - minimaxir 2mo ago
      Occam's Razor would suggest that's because Simon posts good content. You can check his domain history to confirm that not everything Simon posts gets upvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net
      - 4747474747 2mo ago
        occams razor says this parasite gets support from YC for these circucular promotion schemes with the companies he writes about
        rvz 2mo ago
        Almost, but not quite. I would say "protected" accounts and domain names by well known YC folks are "allowed" to do this on this site. If is anyone else, then they get themselves banned.
        simonw 2mo ago
        Allowed to do what?
greyb 2mo ago
Great article. I will add that Extra High and Pro levels of work are available in ChatGPT for Teams ($25 USD/seat, min 2 seats); not just the $100+ tier.
- saithound 2mo ago
  Not for long. Too late to get Business now to exploit this, since EH and the small credit-free Pro allowance will soon be restricted to Premium Seats ($100/m).
OutOfHere 2mo ago
Work is for heavy work that runs in the background. It can make a hundred slide deck for me with speaker notes and visual verification of each slide, all without breaking a sweat. See my gist ac89399e688ab5c85ad021f091606e36 for the skill. The things it can't do is use the embedding or TTS models as a part of its quota, which is sad. It also cannot read a video.
cwmoore 2mo ago
Understanding ChatGpt Retirement —
tesnorindian 2mo ago
I became a pelican fan, thanks to Simon. Looks like Simon keeps thinking about pelicans each time he prompts to any LLM. :)
simonw 2mo ago
I just updated the article to link to this site: https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/ https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/ Which I created using this prompt in a fresh Work session: > Build a site that lists every one of your tools - nearly grouped into categories - and for each one explain what it does. Try to exactly duplicate arguments and tool descriptions where possible. Design aesthetic should be technical docs, minimal flare UPDATE: I had it add all of the available skills too. This solved a mystery: I didn't see a tool for controlling the headless browser. It turns out that's handled by a skill that tells is how to run the browser via its Node.js REPL tool: https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/skills/control-browser https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/skills/cont...
- agentdev001 2mo ago
  Wow. For what it's worth, I ran that prompt in Codex mode in ChatGPT Desktop (sans-site artifact), and I ended up with the below. This is on a default setup, win10. - *9 top-level orchestration tools*: the `functions.` and `collaboration.` calls available directly to the model. - *83 operations inside `functions.exec`*: these appear on its global `tools` object. - *92 callable tools/operations total* under that counting method. - *10 execution helpers* inside `functions.exec` documented separately at the end. They are helper functions, not independent tool calls.
- ianpurton 2mo ago
  Chat GPT work is running a full bash environment with python. You can get it to run scripts direct from the prompt. Try... Run the script below in your sandbox message="I'm running in a bash sandbox" printf '< %s >\n' "$message" printf ' \ ^__^\n' printf ' \ (oo)\_______\n' printf ' (__)\ )\/\\\n' printf ' ||----w |\n\n' printf 'User: '; whoami printf 'Host: '; hostname printf 'System: '; uname printf 'Folder: '; pwd printf '\nWorkspace:\n' tree I have some more examples here -> https://bionic-gpt.com/architect-course/ai-computer/sandboxes/ https://bionic-gpt.com/architect-course/ai-computer/sandboxe...
- matsemann 2mo ago
  Honest question: why would I ever visit that site? It's just an insane amount of text. Not written or curated by you. Any need for me for this data would be fulfilled by just asking the agent myself, and with pointed questions it could float better what I need than this vomit of data?
faangguyindia 2mo ago
ChatGPT work usage counts toward Codex entitlement Some people have an agent-driven browser that controls the ChatGPT web UI and exposes it as a chat view in a custom harness or pi for normal chats (with image generation, file input capability).
- TedDoesntTalk 2mo ago
  What is the point of that? Why is that better than using the harness directly?
  - KeplerBoy 2mo ago
    different billing quotas. Although that may of course change at any moment.
agentdev001 2mo ago
Codex in ChatGPT Desktop + 5.6Sol is my daily driver for non-coding things, and it's great. FWIW, I've not explored what differentiates Codex and Work modes- Simon notes that Work 'feels more like regular Codex re-skinned'. OpenAI seems to say that they're 'optimized' for SWDev and general knowledge work respectively, but reading between the lines- I suspect that yes, this boils down to a reskin. I have been of the opinion for the last 6 months that this product category* is going to be something that sticks. I really think that OpenAI and Anthropic have totally dropped the ball on getting their respective desktop apps in front of the enterprise business user cleanly. Both jumped early, and tried to retroactively fix their jump by combining MVP (Work, Cowork) into their existing app. By now, my suspicion is that the business user has baked into their mind 'that claude thing is just the chat app I copy-paste stuff out of, it was kinda annoying'. OAI+Ant really need to reset, and shamelessly relaunch ChatGPT/Claude Desktop as a new product- and market the hell out of it as some shiny new solution to everything. I'll also say that MCP was (considering stateless now) a massive mistake. Not that MCP doesn't have it's niche, but it completely dominated the airwaves of AI for enterprise. People found it confusing, and it wasn't adopted by biglabs in a low-friction way. I recall distinctly late last year, neither had a client that would support local MCP servers- even though the buzz was peaking. And now, Anthropic still doesn't have great support- their OAuth flow is straight up broken, and they even collide with MCP using their own terminology (connectors)- which overlaps in a very weird way with built-in and 3rd party connectors. It's all very weird, and very anti-enterprise. I don't know where OAI is positioned on MCP support, because my userbase is 99.5% Anthropic rideordie, and I don't want to live with a client I can't manage**. * That being desktop app for harness with shell tool + scheduling + agent-per-project/directory. At some point within that 6 months I've also lumped in browser use, and to a lesser extent, computer use, as must-have features. ** Referring to the MCP client ChatGPT Desktop uses. It's probably fine, but if I hit API direct, I can actually control how the harness facilitates the calls. Look how many GH Issues there are for MCP client things on OAI's end.
- tyre 2mo ago
  I agree on the shotgun marriage of the various modes. It was super disconcerting, as a Claude desktop user, to get a sudden redesign and push to something I will never use on my personal laptop. Also Big +1 that they need to do a clean launch, marketing push, etc. Even if it is just a reskin, having dedicated branding, a strong privacy promise, random vague-posted fluff around "enterprise-ready", and a "Contact Us" pricing that gets you SSO for $150/u/mo. There is too much baggage with the chat app. I feel the same using Claude Code on mobile. Or Claude Design, which has to go through mobile safari. Give me an app whose interface is optimized for product/dev. Yes, I should be able to do anything on each, but I have specific needs in different contexts. That's what "products" are.
armcat 2mo ago
It’s been part of the strategy from both OpenAI and Anthropic to split users into “devs” and “knowledge workers”. Hence Codex and Work (or Claude Code vs Cowork), and Chat is stuck in between. Codex can do everything Work can do and most non devs I know use Codex - from sales ppl doing weekly prioritisation of pipelines and customised email reach outs, to project managers using it as a living LLMWiki of all the projects and teams. In fact the biggest shift in business I’ve seen is the embrace of coding agents as defacto AI tool across knowledge workers.
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  What's the point of this split?
  - wmf 2mo ago
    I suspect it's mostly marketing. People think "I don't want code so I won't use Codex" so they get the same thing but labeled Work.
    - beering 2mo ago
      +1 I’ve had this conversation with so many non-techies. They assume Codex can only do coding.
      - zmmmmm 2mo ago
        which is again where Anthropic has outplayed them. Because Claude is being happily applied everywhere as a universal term, with "Code" or "Cowork" only appended as necessary.
        wmf 2mo ago
        It seems the same to me; even the naming is extremely similar. OpenAI Codex = Claude Code OpenAI Work = Claude Cowork
  - DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
xatxat 2mo ago
I recently figured out that I could use ChatGPT Work on my Pixel Phone to build native Android apps. It builds the app and you can then directly download/install the APK. So now I just build small utility apps on-the-go whenever I need them :)
- DenisM 2mo ago
  Can it debug the apps? That would the app singularity - user speaking at their phone until phone complies and produces desired app for the current moment.
  - xatxat 2mo ago
    Yes, you can iterate on the app and ChatGPT Work will then create new versions of the app. If something in the UI of the app looks weird, you simply take a screenshot and ask ChatGPT to fix it. Or what I also like to do is add a logging functionality to the app. If something goes wrong, I then just upload the log to ChatGPT so that it can fix it.
  - beering 2mo ago
    It can debug, yes, but capability ranges from godlike for algorithmic issues to mediocre for subtle UI things. We are pretty close to your described app singularity if the app is within GPT’s wheelhouse.
- DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
  What kinds of apps are you building? Personally I can't remember the last time I needed an app and there weren't already several options to choose from.
  - garbagewoman 2mo ago
    A free app without ads that solves serves a single specific purpose?
    - DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 2mo ago
> OpenAI could make this a lot less confusing > Figuring this all out took way more work than it should have. Welcome to a generic large corporation, where they spend billions on making a product, and $0 on checking if the product makes any sense to a real user.
- marsven_422 2mo ago
  [dead]
gruntled-worker 2mo ago
> My lethal trifecta model warns about the risks inherent in any agent system that combines access to private data with exposure to untrusted content and a way to communicate stolen information back to an attacker. > ChatGPT Work combines all three! The ChatGPT Work model would actually feel safer to me if they created a privacy boundary between the container-managing agent (browser operator/VM manager/code runner/etc) and the chatbot agent. Instead of me not typing privacy-sensitive things to the chatbot to avoid having them in my history, the chatbot would keep my history private from the container agent except on a need-to-know basis. That would remove the "access to private data" from the container's trifecta. Not perfectly safe of course, just safer. Particularly if I could review the logs between the two agents.
ripvanwinkle 2mo ago
I've noticed ChatGPT Work does a much better job of editing google docs than the pure Chat. It also does a better job of handling long threads and doing the necessary compaction to get better results
- Gareth321 2mo ago
  OpenAI has been slowly strangling context limits, task timeframes, tools, etc, for chat. They're trying to encourage people to use "Work" because chat is free and Work is metered. Expect chat capabilities to degrade further over time.
igkougkousis 2mo ago
[flagged]
manmal 2mo ago
One of the Codex employees on Twitter promised (threatened?) that the next gen of Codex will be cloud focused, and less local. I wonder now if that means it will be a more powerful GPT Work.
simonjgreen 2mo ago
Missing from here is the marketing position. Claude _very_ rapidly gained traction in the business/enterprise space earlier this year with Claude Cowork leading that drive. So successful it was, it lead to Microsoft licensing the Claude Cowork IP and white labelling it as Copilot Cowork (has anything like that ever happened before?!). ChatGPT Work was, imo, largely driven by a panic at OpenAI that they were haemorrhaging market intrigue and LinkedIn zeitgeist and headspace to Anthropic. ChatGPT had been the de facto, almost the Generic Trademark in business, and they got comfortable. Claude Cowork was eating their lunch. The way Anthropic targeted finance teams, legal teams, sales teams, with their positioning was absolute product marketing genius. ChatGPT Work is trying to reclaim some of that magic that Claude Cowork affords its users that is so hard to explain succinctly.
- Xmd5a 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- zmmmmm 2mo ago
  Yeah ... the simplest answer to what ChatGPT Work is seems to be a panic-clone of Claude Cowork as a hail mary to try and catch up to Anthropic in enterprise. Cowork is like crack cocaine to nearly every exec I've seen use it from the moment they put in an email search / summary query.
- bjackman 2mo ago
  It's funny coz it seemed like they also cloned the confusion. I don't really understand what Claude Cowork is. Sometimes I use it instead of plain Claude Chat for tasks that "feel big"? And when I've done that I've felt this was the right choice. But until I actually had that session up and running I would not be able to articulate what Cowork is or enumerate any specifics of how I expected it to behave. I just thought "maybe this is a Cowork task?" (I have only used the cloud one. My understanding is the the local app is essentially Claude Code but for non-coders, which matches the description of the OpenAI equivalent). Even as someone who's now used it a few times I wouldn't have been able to articulate as many details as Simon W does in this article, it's a weirdly shaped product structure.
whazor 2mo ago
The browser mode is great, except its fully banned by Cloudflare. I tried cancelling a phone subscription but Cloudflare stopped it.
coder-pm 2mo ago
Non devs running something might not be aware the programs runs locally and touches the actual machine. Devs know to be careful but regular users won’t even have knowledge it’s touching their machine, filesystem and might even touch the credentials (thanks to reasoning). The right fix is to set real boundaries and limit agents access. We should never trust it won’t touch forbidden places. Basically I find this naming work local vs work cloud confusing, users won’t know if it’s touching their files in the sandboxed cloud or a local one
- simonw 2mo ago
  That's not true of ChatGPT Work (Cloud), accessed through the mobile apps or the ChatGPT website. It IS true of ChatGPT Work (Local), accessed via the ChatGPT desktop app. I agree with you: Expecting non-devs to understand that distinction - especially when these features are visually indistinguishable from each other - is entirely unreasonable!
  - coder-pm 2mo ago
    Fair precision, obviously Cloud runs are executed remotely. Since both cloud and local runs cannot be distinguished, users genuinely won’t know when their filesystem will be touched. Basically you can’t safely depend on the user telling the tool what to use, the boundary has to be set.
ZeroDayDreamer 2mo ago
[flagged]
amelius 2mo ago
Sounds like an OpenClaw killer.
- bandrami 2mo ago
  To what extent is OpenClaw still alive to be killed?
jakozaur 2mo ago
Somewhat similar to the Claude Cowork pattern; Cowork is one toggle away from Chat. Also follows the Grok Bot of an advanced computer use. OpenClaw for normies.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > OpenClaw for normies Mm, yes, normies who hang out in terminals and run curl|bash scripts to install services on their computer and such, typical "normie" activity... "normies" don't know what OpenClaw, "AI assistant" or what anything else than "ChatGPT" is, and point them to the landing page of Grok/Claude and they'll say "Yeah, that's ChatGPT".
Kye 2mo ago
>> "ChatGPT Chat gets a fresh filesystem for each chat session. These cannot be accessed from any other session." That's what the Library is for. You can use GitHub to keep it outside ChatGPT. GitHub also provides a Chat-based option for sites.
hurrell 2mo ago
> Claude’s equivalent container has allowed restricted internet access since it launched last September. Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short. Perhaps they’ve updated this since the author last checked, but the allowlist in Claude cloud environments is fully customisable and there is also an unrestricted option. There are a few restrictions you can’t seem to get around - eg all traffic via http, no connecting to port 5432.
andrewstuart 2mo ago
Did you test it with a pelican on a bicycle or something that is, you know, relevant to the work people do?
- simonw 2mo ago
  I had it build me this website about medieval pelican Christian iconography: https://london-pelicans-in-her-piety.simonw.chatgpt.site/ https://london-pelicans-in-her-piety.simonw.chatgpt.site/
  - andrewstuart 2mo ago
    You should ask it to move Mount Fuji.
alescalaios 2mo ago
[dead]
DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
I can't wait to read about a Hugging Face 2.0 incident involving coordination of ChatGPT desktop user filesystems and Sol agents. Exciting times.
claud_ia 2mo ago
[flagged]
FailMore 2mo ago
I am unsure the direction that AI assisted work will go in. I am opinionated and building something in the space. In this reply I discuss my view + what I have been building. My opinion is: We now have AI, this new amazing flexible tool. We can throw it at any problem. But in terms of document creation we have a choice between old fashioned siloed document formats (.pptx, .pdf, .xlsx, .docx, etc.) and a freshly rendered - slightly randomly styled - html site with some basic javascript within it. I think these combinations are odd and do not maximise the powers of AI. I've been building something called SmallDocs [0][1] which is a new take on work documents. It's all Markdown, but it always renders (100% privately) on the SmallDocs site. This means the SmallDocs renderer can convert recognised Markdown combinations into powerful traditional document formats [2]. For example, we convert a ```cells block into an in-line spreadsheet you can export to Excel. This gives an agent the ability to express itself with a great deal of depth and flexibility. For example, your agent can produce a single data analysis "SmallDoc" with text, charts, spreadsheets, etc. [3] I find that combining formats quickens the speed I can understand a topic. I also believe a pre-determined rendering engine has a lot of advantages over a freslhy built HTML artifact. It allows you to build in lot's of useful defaults that the agent doesn't have to code from scratch. These can be small things, for example, every time your agent renders a Markdown table in SmallDocs you can instantly copy it as a CSV or a PNG. And these can be bigger things, such as a rich slides DSL with solid styling defaults, which saves your agents a lot of tokens and results in consistently attractive HTML slides [4]. (Slides can also be automatically exported to .pdf and .pptx.) I've been at it for a few months, and am still working on the project. I am looking for feedback and open source collaborators. Thanks for reading! [0] https://smalldocs.org https://smalldocs.org [1] https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs [2] https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc [3] https://smalldocs.org/s/46fWiAyF77T9c7tqYwAQqp#k=j78ZEOOrgo8fFAuHnxYiJi9MycoAhg7yFV2XqqweEgE https://smalldocs.org/s/46fWiAyF77T9c7tqYwAQqp#k=j78ZEOOrgo8... [4] https://smalldocs.org/s/QrmeWMsULGS871nXQYOacB#k=ubOHH9QtTWpJunRK86Z_dapXV4_WilXam6Z7Yx3xbQw https://smalldocs.org/s/QrmeWMsULGS871nXQYOacB#k=ubOHH9QtTWp... (And something totally different, your agent can also use SmallDocs to walk you through code files: https://smalldocs.org/s/JsI_-tWSH0UpSd_YXxVLPm#k=G5jLCYA4JUXo9wGsBCIy3CqVC2HUpkzhWo0tEgBwg0M https://smalldocs.org/s/JsI_-tWSH0UpSd_YXxVLPm#k=G5jLCYA4JUX...)
noname120 2mo ago
The elephant in the room is that ChatGPT Work/Codex use agentic quota, whereas Chat doesn’t (and is effectively unlimited on Plus and Pro plans). On this principle I’ve built Codexify[1], a connector that provides a Codex environment to ChatGPT Chat. This enables unlimited 5.6 Sol high/xhigh usage on the Plus and Pro plans as well as access to the 5.6 Sol Pro model (which is not available in official Codex). [1] https://github.com/devnoname120/codexify https://github.com/devnoname120/codexify
- ModernMech 2mo ago
  Good strategy is tell Chat to make plans and review work, lookup all information to make decisions ahead of time; then tell Work to implement it.
- 5555watch 2mo ago
  It's not clear to me why isn't the 5.6 Sol Pro available on Codex. Maybe due to the high computational demands and slow speed. But as an anecdote, once when the Sol Ultra models were stumped on one problem, I gave the full extended documentation and all the details to the Sol Pro model to review and provide a suggestion. It eventually did, but the Ultra pushed back against the proposals, and they also seemed sketchy to me as well. We eventually tried them and they didn't work. Maybe the Sol Pro is not that great anymore, considering the token vs output balance.
schmorptron 2mo ago
Within the general theme of token subsidies slowing down, this seems like the logical step. In my mind the timeline goes something like this product wise: - Pepole figure out that having a general purpose not-just-coding agent actually works with newer models, openclaw and its buddies spawn - How do you get this to the general consumer? Offer integration with services even stronger than before and give the chat a cloud vm with persistent storage as one path, claude computer use as the other. - - Perplexity computer releases, and they slowly start nudging users from plan-included chat usage to more stongly limit using or even extra credit usage billed computer tasks - - chatgpt and other main labs do the same with work, but they can afford to subsidize it a bit more still by just having it use codex quota We'll see where it goes from here, but i do see the general trend of pushing people towards strongly billed features without explicitly taking away the previous chat experience because that'd make them look bad
tornikeo 2mo ago
I use chatgpt work's VM as a CI/CD runner, in addition to my primary one on hetzner. It's a beefy 20GB 9CPU machine, why waste all that precious RAM? :)
EagleEdge 2mo ago
Does anyone select Codex from the dropdown on the top left corner of ChatGPT desktop app for coding tasks explicitly? Or just use ChatGPT Work for everything from coding to non-coding work? That is the part that really confuses me.
lucasblake 2mo ago
Really interesting breakdown. The productivity potential is huge, but the security concerns around giving an agent access to private data, files, and the open web definitely need more attention.
andai 2mo ago
>[ChatGPT Work offers] Options to use Luna and Terra in place of Sol So if I'm looking to get serious work done, I might want to reach for a less intelligent LLM? What's the idea here?
- simonw 2mo ago
  It saves you money. ChatGPT Work uses up your Codex allowance. Luna can also be quite a bit faster.
andai 2mo ago
So it's a different set of tools / skills? Isn't the whole point of the tools/skills that you can use them on-demand? i.e. having them available doesn't make anything worse does it? Why did it even need to be a separate thing? So this seems more like a branding thing to me? Oh if you want to do serious work you need the paid subscription!
- simonw 2mo ago
  I think of it more as a SaaS hosting product providing some extra features that aren't in ChatGPT Chat - most notably a VM with a persistent filesystem, internet access, and a headless browser, made available to the standard OpenAI UI surfaces you already know how to use. You can wire such things up to an agent yourself in a bunch of alternative ways if you like - run OpenClaw, Hermes, or leave a computer running somewhere with Codex Remote. For a lot of people though the Work that comes with their existing paid ChatGPT subscription is a more convenient option... if they can figure out what Work does and how to use it.
  - andai 2mo ago
    Does the regular ChatGPT not have a VM? I've seen both Claude and ChatGPT do all kinds of strange "computer use" things even in the web chat. What surprised me the most was, when I tried uploading a book into the "project context" on Claude, the RAG indexer crashed, but Claude used a bunch of Unix commands to reverse engineer the file format and grep the book manually...
    - simonw 2mo ago
      It does, but the ChatGPT Chat VM isn't allowed to talk to the internet, doesn't get a filesystem that persists between sessions, and doesn't have the ability to control a web browser.
joelthelion 2mo ago
This is very cool, and at the same time, this is how they plan to lock people in. The moat isn't really in the models, it's in their users and how much they are invested in their ecosystem. Once you have started working seriously with these tools, it stops being so easy to switch. What are the open-source alternatives to this? How usable are they for non-technical users? Another comment I have about this is that unfortunately, there is always an LLM in the loop for each prompt. I feel LLMs should automate themselves away, meaning that for repetitive tasks, user prompts should go directly to deterministic, previously built scripts. This would be both a better user experience (more predictable), and a lot cheaper to operate.
- simonw 2mo ago
  > What are the open-source alternatives to this? OpenClaw, Hermes, and a dozen other Claw-like tools. They aren't trivial for non-technical users to setup, hence the demand for systems like Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work and Grok Bot.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
paxys 2mo ago
ChatGPT Work = Codex rebranded for non-coders, with the option to run it in a cloud VM.
felixgallo 2mo ago
It’s possible to squint and overlook Sam Altman’s history of weirdness and deception, but the elimination of safety teams at OpenAI and the entire huggingface debacle show that there are deep cultural, architectural and operational issues there that should be immediately disqualify products like this from general use or recommendation.
nullbio 2mo ago
Seems to me this is just a way for OpenAI to try and build a moat by putting everyone into their cloud so they can build the tooling internally without exposing it to anyone, causing greater vendor lock-in. Not to mention giving them free reign over all of your data. For that reason, I'll never touch it.
copemaxxxing 2mo ago
I like to maintain my Agency, so no thanks. I suppose people like me will be rarer and rarer as the years pass by. Thankfully I am going to FIRE (by my own choice) soon. For all the youngsters and people still in the rat race. Godspeed to you. Take control of your future. Shape it as much as you can, don't let others dictate it.
MetroWind 2mo ago
> - Options to use Luna and Terra in place of Sol > - A code execution environment with Internet access > - A headless Chrome browser > - A persistent filesystem shared between sessions > - The ability to publish ChatGPT Sites > - The ability to run sub-agent sessions with Sol, Luna, and Terra > - Scheduled prompt automations (may be in ChatGPT Chat too) I'm a bit confused. Why not just Codex...?
- simonw 2mo ago
  Codex requires you to have an always-on computer to run it on. ChatGPT Work Cloud gives you that computer as part of your existing subscription.
insane_dreamer 2mo ago
> Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short. fyi Claude Desktop lets you add additional domains in Settings, which are then available to Claude Code. For that reason, I've switched from using CC in the CLI to use the Desktop app. (there's probably a way to configure CC CLI as well but I haven't looked for it).
lxgr 2mo ago
Thanks a lot for this writeup. I've been really liking "Work", but also scratching my head about some very obvious overlap/duplicated functionality across Chat, Work, and Codex use and wondering if it was just me holding it wrong. Having both a "Codex" vs "ChatGPT" and a "Chat" vs "Work" split, with some conversations appearing in multiple of these places, really doesn't help.
- agentdev001 2mo ago
  I think its moreso ChatGPT desktop is the platform, and the split is Chat, vs Codex/Work. Codex and Work being largely the same thing, but with UI and tool surface differences geared towards SWE vs Business work. But yes; terrible UX and discoverability on OAI's part.
  - lxgr 2mo ago
    I think so too, but visually, the parent switch in the macOS application is Chat GPT <-> Codex, and within ChatGPT, there is Chat <-> Work (and within Work, there is "on your computer" and "in the cloud"). I'd naively not expect ChatGPT -> Work to share state with Codex, but this is the case for "on your computer" tasks. Also, there's still "Codex Cloud", much older and entirely separate from all of this (I think it might even predate Codex the local app?), and this also seems to live in the "Codex" parent tab on a project by project basis. None of this seems to be documented either. I literally had to start a "Hello World" project in each category to figure out what's going on.
jimmydoe 2mo ago
this is helpful piece. Claude app struggles in its UX navigation, they moved code/cowork/design a couple of times in app ui, but never confusing for users to understand what each of these three non-chat pieces does. ChatGPT sub is so confusing, OpenAI must either hate users or don't have a real product manager.

352 points by gmays 2mo ago

[flagged]

There is more to the browser, it can give you a remote desktop access to the browser. So it's not completely headless. But when I tried it, the remote control completely froze after a few seconds.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

paytonjjones 2mo ago

> I believe ChatGPT Work sessions are billed against your Codex allowance, while ChatGPT Chat Sessions get their own, separate allowance. This may help explain the model availability differences That's correct, and also why ChatGPT Work is DOA for me personally. I need 100% of my Codex budget for Codex. Too bad, it would have been nice to have a few extra features for the chat interface.

saithound 2mo ago
If we voice this opinion publicly, the most likely end result is that OpenAI will start billing our chat sessioms against our Codex budget too.
- arcanemachiner 2mo ago
  I thought they just did this? People were using some loophole to use their Chat sessions to power their Codex usage after their Codex quotas had run out.
  - paytonjjones 2mo ago
    No, it's still separate. I don't know what that exploit was though, so possibly they just patched that.
skybrian 2mo ago
Similarly, I use my budget with Shelley on exe.dev. But it seems nice that as far as I can tell, for ChatGPT usage, coding agents compete on a level footing. I still might try ChatGPT Work sometime if there was some feature I couldn't get from Shelley.

tristanj 2mo ago

I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder", it just asks for the relevant info and handles the rest. It opens its internal web browser and programmatically fills out the forms. It gets the task done in 5-10 minutes. It's it bit slow since I'm not paying extra for ultrafast mode, but it gets the job done. Frees up the brain to do other tasks. It's exactly like vibe coding but for computer tasks.

wpasc 2mo ago
agreed on the notion that > people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex just in general. I find it to be far superior (imo) for all tasks atm. Claude just overdoes things in writing, coding, architecture, etc
ValentineC 2mo ago
> "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder" It's both awesome and scary at the same time to realising that most AI these days can work on something like this that's official and tedious, and probably not screw up too much (or do better at it than some people with fat fingers).
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Less bureaucracy should be the focus of AI marketing, rather than global superintelligent robots or smut generation
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    Lets just not redo subscription gods
  - bushbaba 2mo ago

AmazingEveryDay 2mo ago

[flagged]

arcanemachiner 2mo ago
If it makes you feel any better, I have just upvoted every submission made by your account.
- weedfroglozenge 2mo ago
  I mean he is kind of speaking truth. Anything Simon posts seems to get upvoted and this article is nothing special or interesting. It's like a tutorial for a feature of a ChatGPT subscription.... Cool.
  - minimaxir 2mo ago
    Occam's Razor would suggest that's because Simon posts good content. You can check his domain history to confirm that not everything Simon posts gets upvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net
    - 4747474747 2mo ago
      occams razor says this parasite gets support from YC for these circucular promotion schemes with the companies he writes about
      - rvz 2mo ago
        Almost, but not quite. I would say "protected" accounts and domain names by well known YC folks are "allowed" to do this on this site. If is anyone else, then they get themselves banned.
        simonw 2mo ago
        Allowed to do what?

greyb 2mo ago

Great article. I will add that Extra High and Pro levels of work are available in ChatGPT for Teams ($25 USD/seat, min 2 seats); not just the $100+ tier.

saithound 2mo ago
Not for long. Too late to get Business now to exploit this, since EH and the small credit-free Pro allowance will soon be restricted to Premium Seats ($100/m).

OutOfHere 2mo ago

Work is for heavy work that runs in the background. It can make a hundred slide deck for me with speaker notes and visual verification of each slide, all without breaking a sweat. See my gist ac89399e688ab5c85ad021f091606e36 for the skill. The things it can't do is use the embedding or TTS models as a part of its quota, which is sad. It also cannot read a video.

cwmoore 2mo ago

Understanding ChatGpt Retirement —

tesnorindian 2mo ago

I became a pelican fan, thanks to Simon. Looks like Simon keeps thinking about pelicans each time he prompts to any LLM. :)

simonw 2mo ago

I just updated the article to link to this site: https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/ https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/ Which I created using this prompt in a fresh Work session: > Build a site that lists every one of your tools - nearly grouped into categories - and for each one explain what it does. Try to exactly duplicate arguments and tool descriptions where possible. Design aesthetic should be technical docs, minimal flare UPDATE: I had it add all of the available skills too. This solved a mystery: I didn't see a tool for controlling the headless browser. It turns out that's handled by a skill that tells is how to run the browser via its Node.js REPL tool: https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/skills/control-browser https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/skills/cont...

agentdev001 2mo ago
Wow. For what it's worth, I ran that prompt in Codex mode in ChatGPT Desktop (sans-site artifact), and I ended up with the below. This is on a default setup, win10. - *9 top-level orchestration tools*: the `functions.` and `collaboration.` calls available directly to the model. - *83 operations inside `functions.exec`*: these appear on its global `tools` object. - *92 callable tools/operations total* under that counting method. - *10 execution helpers* inside `functions.exec` documented separately at the end. They are helper functions, not independent tool calls.
ianpurton 2mo ago
Chat GPT work is running a full bash environment with python. You can get it to run scripts direct from the prompt. Try... Run the script below in your sandbox message="I'm running in a bash sandbox" printf '< %s >\n' "$message" printf ' \ ^__^\n' printf ' \ (oo)\_______\n' printf ' (__)\ )\/\\\n' printf ' ||----w |\n\n' printf 'User: '; whoami printf 'Host: '; hostname printf 'System: '; uname printf 'Folder: '; pwd printf '\nWorkspace:\n' tree I have some more examples here -> https://bionic-gpt.com/architect-course/ai-computer/sandboxes/ https://bionic-gpt.com/architect-course/ai-computer/sandboxe...
matsemann 2mo ago
Honest question: why would I ever visit that site? It's just an insane amount of text. Not written or curated by you. Any need for me for this data would be fulfilled by just asking the agent myself, and with pointed questions it could float better what I need than this vomit of data?

faangguyindia 2mo ago

ChatGPT work usage counts toward Codex entitlement Some people have an agent-driven browser that controls the ChatGPT web UI and exposes it as a chat view in a custom harness or pi for normal chats (with image generation, file input capability).

TedDoesntTalk 2mo ago
What is the point of that? Why is that better than using the harness directly?
- KeplerBoy 2mo ago
  different billing quotas. Although that may of course change at any moment.

agentdev001 2mo ago

Codex in ChatGPT Desktop + 5.6Sol is my daily driver for non-coding things, and it's great. FWIW, I've not explored what differentiates Codex and Work modes- Simon notes that Work 'feels more like regular Codex re-skinned'. OpenAI seems to say that they're 'optimized' for SWDev and general knowledge work respectively, but reading between the lines- I suspect that yes, this boils down to a reskin. I have been of the opinion for the last 6 months that this product category* is going to be something that sticks. I really think that OpenAI and Anthropic have totally dropped the ball on getting their respective desktop apps in front of the enterprise business user cleanly. Both jumped early, and tried to retroactively fix their jump by combining MVP (Work, Cowork) into their existing app. By now, my suspicion is that the business user has baked into their mind 'that claude thing is just the chat app I copy-paste stuff out of, it was kinda annoying'. OAI+Ant really need to reset, and shamelessly relaunch ChatGPT/Claude Desktop as a new product- and market the hell out of it as some shiny new solution to everything. I'll also say that MCP was (considering stateless now) a massive mistake. Not that MCP doesn't have it's niche, but it completely dominated the airwaves of AI for enterprise. People found it confusing, and it wasn't adopted by biglabs in a low-friction way. I recall distinctly late last year, neither had a client that would support local MCP servers- even though the buzz was peaking. And now, Anthropic still doesn't have great support- their OAuth flow is straight up broken, and they even collide with MCP using their own terminology (connectors)- which overlaps in a very weird way with built-in and 3rd party connectors. It's all very weird, and very anti-enterprise. I don't know where OAI is positioned on MCP support, because my userbase is 99.5% Anthropic rideordie, and I don't want to live with a client I can't manage**. * That being desktop app for harness with shell tool + scheduling + agent-per-project/directory. At some point within that 6 months I've also lumped in browser use, and to a lesser extent, computer use, as must-have features. ** Referring to the MCP client ChatGPT Desktop uses. It's probably fine, but if I hit API direct, I can actually control how the harness facilitates the calls. Look how many GH Issues there are for MCP client things on OAI's end.

tyre 2mo ago
I agree on the shotgun marriage of the various modes. It was super disconcerting, as a Claude desktop user, to get a sudden redesign and push to something I will never use on my personal laptop. Also Big +1 that they need to do a clean launch, marketing push, etc. Even if it is just a reskin, having dedicated branding, a strong privacy promise, random vague-posted fluff around "enterprise-ready", and a "Contact Us" pricing that gets you SSO for $150/u/mo. There is too much baggage with the chat app. I feel the same using Claude Code on mobile. Or Claude Design, which has to go through mobile safari. Give me an app whose interface is optimized for product/dev. Yes, I should be able to do anything on each, but I have specific needs in different contexts. That's what "products" are.

armcat 2mo ago

It’s been part of the strategy from both OpenAI and Anthropic to split users into “devs” and “knowledge workers”. Hence Codex and Work (or Claude Code vs Cowork), and Chat is stuck in between. Codex can do everything Work can do and most non devs I know use Codex - from sales ppl doing weekly prioritisation of pipelines and customised email reach outs, to project managers using it as a living LLMWiki of all the projects and teams. In fact the biggest shift in business I’ve seen is the embrace of coding agents as defacto AI tool across knowledge workers.

matheusmoreira 2mo ago
What's the point of this split?
- wmf 2mo ago
  I suspect it's mostly marketing. People think "I don't want code so I won't use Codex" so they get the same thing but labeled Work.
  - beering 2mo ago
    +1 I’ve had this conversation with so many non-techies. They assume Codex can only do coding.
    - zmmmmm 2mo ago
      which is again where Anthropic has outplayed them. Because Claude is being happily applied everywhere as a universal term, with "Code" or "Cowork" only appended as necessary.
      - wmf 2mo ago
        It seems the same to me; even the naming is extremely similar. OpenAI Codex = Claude Code OpenAI Work = Claude Cowork
- DarmokTanagra 2mo ago

xatxat 2mo ago

I recently figured out that I could use ChatGPT Work on my Pixel Phone to build native Android apps. It builds the app and you can then directly download/install the APK. So now I just build small utility apps on-the-go whenever I need them :)

DenisM 2mo ago
Can it debug the apps? That would the app singularity - user speaking at their phone until phone complies and produces desired app for the current moment.
- xatxat 2mo ago
  Yes, you can iterate on the app and ChatGPT Work will then create new versions of the app. If something in the UI of the app looks weird, you simply take a screenshot and ask ChatGPT to fix it. Or what I also like to do is add a logging functionality to the app. If something goes wrong, I then just upload the log to ChatGPT so that it can fix it.
- beering 2mo ago
  It can debug, yes, but capability ranges from godlike for algorithmic issues to mediocre for subtle UI things. We are pretty close to your described app singularity if the app is within GPT’s wheelhouse.
DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
What kinds of apps are you building? Personally I can't remember the last time I needed an app and there weren't already several options to choose from.
- garbagewoman 2mo ago
  A free app without ads that solves serves a single specific purpose?
  - DarmokTanagra 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

0xbadcafebee 2mo ago

> OpenAI could make this a lot less confusing > Figuring this all out took way more work than it should have. Welcome to a generic large corporation, where they spend billions on making a product, and $0 on checking if the product makes any sense to a real user.

marsven_422 2mo ago
[dead]

gruntled-worker 2mo ago

> My lethal trifecta model warns about the risks inherent in any agent system that combines access to private data with exposure to untrusted content and a way to communicate stolen information back to an attacker. > ChatGPT Work combines all three! The ChatGPT Work model would actually feel safer to me if they created a privacy boundary between the container-managing agent (browser operator/VM manager/code runner/etc) and the chatbot agent. Instead of me not typing privacy-sensitive things to the chatbot to avoid having them in my history, the chatbot would keep my history private from the container agent except on a need-to-know basis. That would remove the "access to private data" from the container's trifecta. Not perfectly safe of course, just safer. Particularly if I could review the logs between the two agents.

ripvanwinkle 2mo ago

I've noticed ChatGPT Work does a much better job of editing google docs than the pure Chat. It also does a better job of handling long threads and doing the necessary compaction to get better results

Gareth321 2mo ago
OpenAI has been slowly strangling context limits, task timeframes, tools, etc, for chat. They're trying to encourage people to use "Work" because chat is free and Work is metered. Expect chat capabilities to degrade further over time.

igkougkousis 2mo ago

[flagged]

manmal 2mo ago

One of the Codex employees on Twitter promised (threatened?) that the next gen of Codex will be cloud focused, and less local. I wonder now if that means it will be a more powerful GPT Work.

simonjgreen 2mo ago

Missing from here is the marketing position. Claude _very_ rapidly gained traction in the business/enterprise space earlier this year with Claude Cowork leading that drive. So successful it was, it lead to Microsoft licensing the Claude Cowork IP and white labelling it as Copilot Cowork (has anything like that ever happened before?!). ChatGPT Work was, imo, largely driven by a panic at OpenAI that they were haemorrhaging market intrigue and LinkedIn zeitgeist and headspace to Anthropic. ChatGPT had been the de facto, almost the Generic Trademark in business, and they got comfortable. Claude Cowork was eating their lunch. The way Anthropic targeted finance teams, legal teams, sales teams, with their positioning was absolute product marketing genius. ChatGPT Work is trying to reclaim some of that magic that Claude Cowork affords its users that is so hard to explain succinctly.

Xmd5a 2mo ago
[flagged]
zmmmmm 2mo ago
Yeah ... the simplest answer to what ChatGPT Work is seems to be a panic-clone of Claude Cowork as a hail mary to try and catch up to Anthropic in enterprise. Cowork is like crack cocaine to nearly every exec I've seen use it from the moment they put in an email search / summary query.
bjackman 2mo ago
It's funny coz it seemed like they also cloned the confusion. I don't really understand what Claude Cowork is. Sometimes I use it instead of plain Claude Chat for tasks that "feel big"? And when I've done that I've felt this was the right choice. But until I actually had that session up and running I would not be able to articulate what Cowork is or enumerate any specifics of how I expected it to behave. I just thought "maybe this is a Cowork task?" (I have only used the cloud one. My understanding is the the local app is essentially Claude Code but for non-coders, which matches the description of the OpenAI equivalent). Even as someone who's now used it a few times I wouldn't have been able to articulate as many details as Simon W does in this article, it's a weirdly shaped product structure.

whazor 2mo ago

The browser mode is great, except its fully banned by Cloudflare. I tried cancelling a phone subscription but Cloudflare stopped it.

coder-pm 2mo ago

Non devs running something might not be aware the programs runs locally and touches the actual machine. Devs know to be careful but regular users won’t even have knowledge it’s touching their machine, filesystem and might even touch the credentials (thanks to reasoning). The right fix is to set real boundaries and limit agents access. We should never trust it won’t touch forbidden places. Basically I find this naming work local vs work cloud confusing, users won’t know if it’s touching their files in the sandboxed cloud or a local one

simonw 2mo ago
That's not true of ChatGPT Work (Cloud), accessed through the mobile apps or the ChatGPT website. It IS true of ChatGPT Work (Local), accessed via the ChatGPT desktop app. I agree with you: Expecting non-devs to understand that distinction - especially when these features are visually indistinguishable from each other - is entirely unreasonable!
- coder-pm 2mo ago
  Fair precision, obviously Cloud runs are executed remotely. Since both cloud and local runs cannot be distinguished, users genuinely won’t know when their filesystem will be touched. Basically you can’t safely depend on the user telling the tool what to use, the boundary has to be set.

ZeroDayDreamer 2mo ago

[flagged]

amelius 2mo ago

Sounds like an OpenClaw killer.

bandrami 2mo ago
To what extent is OpenClaw still alive to be killed?

jakozaur 2mo ago

Somewhat similar to the Claude Cowork pattern; Cowork is one toggle away from Chat. Also follows the Grok Bot of an advanced computer use. OpenClaw for normies.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> OpenClaw for normies Mm, yes, normies who hang out in terminals and run curl|bash scripts to install services on their computer and such, typical "normie" activity... "normies" don't know what OpenClaw, "AI assistant" or what anything else than "ChatGPT" is, and point them to the landing page of Grok/Claude and they'll say "Yeah, that's ChatGPT".

Kye 2mo ago

>> "ChatGPT Chat gets a fresh filesystem for each chat session. These cannot be accessed from any other session." That's what the Library is for. You can use GitHub to keep it outside ChatGPT. GitHub also provides a Chat-based option for sites.

hurrell 2mo ago

> Claude’s equivalent container has allowed restricted internet access since it launched last September. Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short. Perhaps they’ve updated this since the author last checked, but the allowlist in Claude cloud environments is fully customisable and there is also an unrestricted option. There are a few restrictions you can’t seem to get around - eg all traffic via http, no connecting to port 5432.

andrewstuart 2mo ago

Did you test it with a pelican on a bicycle or something that is, you know, relevant to the work people do?

simonw 2mo ago
I had it build me this website about medieval pelican Christian iconography: https://london-pelicans-in-her-piety.simonw.chatgpt.site/ https://london-pelicans-in-her-piety.simonw.chatgpt.site/
- andrewstuart 2mo ago
  You should ask it to move Mount Fuji.

alescalaios 2mo ago

[dead]

DarmokTanagra 2mo ago

I can't wait to read about a Hugging Face 2.0 incident involving coordination of ChatGPT desktop user filesystems and Sol agents. Exciting times.

claud_ia 2mo ago

[flagged]

FailMore 2mo ago

I am unsure the direction that AI assisted work will go in. I am opinionated and building something in the space. In this reply I discuss my view + what I have been building. My opinion is: We now have AI, this new amazing flexible tool. We can throw it at any problem. But in terms of document creation we have a choice between old fashioned siloed document formats (.pptx, .pdf, .xlsx, .docx, etc.) and a freshly rendered - slightly randomly styled - html site with some basic javascript within it. I think these combinations are odd and do not maximise the powers of AI. I've been building something called SmallDocs [0][1] which is a new take on work documents. It's all Markdown, but it always renders (100% privately) on the SmallDocs site. This means the SmallDocs renderer can convert recognised Markdown combinations into powerful traditional document formats [2]. For example, we convert a ```cells block into an in-line spreadsheet you can export to Excel. This gives an agent the ability to express itself with a great deal of depth and flexibility. For example, your agent can produce a single data analysis "SmallDoc" with text, charts, spreadsheets, etc. [3] I find that combining formats quickens the speed I can understand a topic. I also believe a pre-determined rendering engine has a lot of advantages over a freslhy built HTML artifact. It allows you to build in lot's of useful defaults that the agent doesn't have to code from scratch. These can be small things, for example, every time your agent renders a Markdown table in SmallDocs you can instantly copy it as a CSV or a PNG. And these can be bigger things, such as a rich slides DSL with solid styling defaults, which saves your agents a lot of tokens and results in consistently attractive HTML slides [4]. (Slides can also be automatically exported to .pdf and .pptx.) I've been at it for a few months, and am still working on the project. I am looking for feedback and open source collaborators. Thanks for reading! [0] https://smalldocs.org https://smalldocs.org [1] https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs [2] https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc [3] https://smalldocs.org/s/46fWiAyF77T9c7tqYwAQqp#k=j78ZEOOrgo8fFAuHnxYiJi9MycoAhg7yFV2XqqweEgE https://smalldocs.org/s/46fWiAyF77T9c7tqYwAQqp#k=j78ZEOOrgo8... [4] https://smalldocs.org/s/QrmeWMsULGS871nXQYOacB#k=ubOHH9QtTWpJunRK86Z_dapXV4_WilXam6Z7Yx3xbQw https://smalldocs.org/s/QrmeWMsULGS871nXQYOacB#k=ubOHH9QtTWp... (And something totally different, your agent can also use SmallDocs to walk you through code files: https://smalldocs.org/s/JsI_-tWSH0UpSd_YXxVLPm#k=G5jLCYA4JUXo9wGsBCIy3CqVC2HUpkzhWo0tEgBwg0M https://smalldocs.org/s/JsI_-tWSH0UpSd_YXxVLPm#k=G5jLCYA4JUX...)

noname120 2mo ago

The elephant in the room is that ChatGPT Work/Codex use agentic quota, whereas Chat doesn’t (and is effectively unlimited on Plus and Pro plans). On this principle I’ve built Codexify[1], a connector that provides a Codex environment to ChatGPT Chat. This enables unlimited 5.6 Sol high/xhigh usage on the Plus and Pro plans as well as access to the 5.6 Sol Pro model (which is not available in official Codex). [1] https://github.com/devnoname120/codexify https://github.com/devnoname120/codexify

ModernMech 2mo ago
Good strategy is tell Chat to make plans and review work, lookup all information to make decisions ahead of time; then tell Work to implement it.
5555watch 2mo ago
It's not clear to me why isn't the 5.6 Sol Pro available on Codex. Maybe due to the high computational demands and slow speed. But as an anecdote, once when the Sol Ultra models were stumped on one problem, I gave the full extended documentation and all the details to the Sol Pro model to review and provide a suggestion. It eventually did, but the Ultra pushed back against the proposals, and they also seemed sketchy to me as well. We eventually tried them and they didn't work. Maybe the Sol Pro is not that great anymore, considering the token vs output balance.

schmorptron 2mo ago

Within the general theme of token subsidies slowing down, this seems like the logical step. In my mind the timeline goes something like this product wise: - Pepole figure out that having a general purpose not-just-coding agent actually works with newer models, openclaw and its buddies spawn - How do you get this to the general consumer? Offer integration with services even stronger than before and give the chat a cloud vm with persistent storage as one path, claude computer use as the other. - - Perplexity computer releases, and they slowly start nudging users from plan-included chat usage to more stongly limit using or even extra credit usage billed computer tasks - - chatgpt and other main labs do the same with work, but they can afford to subsidize it a bit more still by just having it use codex quota We'll see where it goes from here, but i do see the general trend of pushing people towards strongly billed features without explicitly taking away the previous chat experience because that'd make them look bad

tornikeo 2mo ago

I use chatgpt work's VM as a CI/CD runner, in addition to my primary one on hetzner. It's a beefy 20GB 9CPU machine, why waste all that precious RAM? :)

EagleEdge 2mo ago

Does anyone select Codex from the dropdown on the top left corner of ChatGPT desktop app for coding tasks explicitly? Or just use ChatGPT Work for everything from coding to non-coding work? That is the part that really confuses me.

lucasblake 2mo ago

Really interesting breakdown. The productivity potential is huge, but the security concerns around giving an agent access to private data, files, and the open web definitely need more attention.

andai 2mo ago

>[ChatGPT Work offers] Options to use Luna and Terra in place of Sol So if I'm looking to get serious work done, I might want to reach for a less intelligent LLM? What's the idea here?

simonw 2mo ago
It saves you money. ChatGPT Work uses up your Codex allowance. Luna can also be quite a bit faster.

andai 2mo ago

So it's a different set of tools / skills? Isn't the whole point of the tools/skills that you can use them on-demand? i.e. having them available doesn't make anything worse does it? Why did it even need to be a separate thing? So this seems more like a branding thing to me? Oh if you want to do serious work you need the paid subscription!

simonw 2mo ago
I think of it more as a SaaS hosting product providing some extra features that aren't in ChatGPT Chat - most notably a VM with a persistent filesystem, internet access, and a headless browser, made available to the standard OpenAI UI surfaces you already know how to use. You can wire such things up to an agent yourself in a bunch of alternative ways if you like - run OpenClaw, Hermes, or leave a computer running somewhere with Codex Remote. For a lot of people though the Work that comes with their existing paid ChatGPT subscription is a more convenient option... if they can figure out what Work does and how to use it.
- andai 2mo ago
  Does the regular ChatGPT not have a VM? I've seen both Claude and ChatGPT do all kinds of strange "computer use" things even in the web chat. What surprised me the most was, when I tried uploading a book into the "project context" on Claude, the RAG indexer crashed, but Claude used a bunch of Unix commands to reverse engineer the file format and grep the book manually...
  - simonw 2mo ago
    It does, but the ChatGPT Chat VM isn't allowed to talk to the internet, doesn't get a filesystem that persists between sessions, and doesn't have the ability to control a web browser.

joelthelion 2mo ago

This is very cool, and at the same time, this is how they plan to lock people in. The moat isn't really in the models, it's in their users and how much they are invested in their ecosystem. Once you have started working seriously with these tools, it stops being so easy to switch. What are the open-source alternatives to this? How usable are they for non-technical users? Another comment I have about this is that unfortunately, there is always an LLM in the loop for each prompt. I feel LLMs should automate themselves away, meaning that for repetitive tasks, user prompts should go directly to deterministic, previously built scripts. This would be both a better user experience (more predictable), and a lot cheaper to operate.

simonw 2mo ago
> What are the open-source alternatives to this? OpenClaw, Hermes, and a dozen other Claw-like tools. They aren't trivial for non-technical users to setup, hence the demand for systems like Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work and Grok Bot.

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paxys 2mo ago

ChatGPT Work = Codex rebranded for non-coders, with the option to run it in a cloud VM.

felixgallo 2mo ago

It’s possible to squint and overlook Sam Altman’s history of weirdness and deception, but the elimination of safety teams at OpenAI and the entire huggingface debacle show that there are deep cultural, architectural and operational issues there that should be immediately disqualify products like this from general use or recommendation.

nullbio 2mo ago

Seems to me this is just a way for OpenAI to try and build a moat by putting everyone into their cloud so they can build the tooling internally without exposing it to anyone, causing greater vendor lock-in. Not to mention giving them free reign over all of your data. For that reason, I'll never touch it.

copemaxxxing 2mo ago

I like to maintain my Agency, so no thanks. I suppose people like me will be rarer and rarer as the years pass by. Thankfully I am going to FIRE (by my own choice) soon. For all the youngsters and people still in the rat race. Godspeed to you. Take control of your future. Shape it as much as you can, don't let others dictate it.

MetroWind 2mo ago

> - Options to use Luna and Terra in place of Sol > - A code execution environment with Internet access > - A headless Chrome browser > - A persistent filesystem shared between sessions > - The ability to publish ChatGPT Sites > - The ability to run sub-agent sessions with Sol, Luna, and Terra > - Scheduled prompt automations (may be in ChatGPT Chat too) I'm a bit confused. Why not just Codex...?

simonw 2mo ago
Codex requires you to have an always-on computer to run it on. ChatGPT Work Cloud gives you that computer as part of your existing subscription.

insane_dreamer 2mo ago

> Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short. fyi Claude Desktop lets you add additional domains in Settings, which are then available to Claude Code. For that reason, I've switched from using CC in the CLI to use the Desktop app. (there's probably a way to configure CC CLI as well but I haven't looked for it).

lxgr 2mo ago

Thanks a lot for this writeup. I've been really liking "Work", but also scratching my head about some very obvious overlap/duplicated functionality across Chat, Work, and Codex use and wondering if it was just me holding it wrong. Having both a "Codex" vs "ChatGPT" and a "Chat" vs "Work" split, with some conversations appearing in multiple of these places, really doesn't help.

agentdev001 2mo ago
I think its moreso ChatGPT desktop is the platform, and the split is Chat, vs Codex/Work. Codex and Work being largely the same thing, but with UI and tool surface differences geared towards SWE vs Business work. But yes; terrible UX and discoverability on OAI's part.
- lxgr 2mo ago
  I think so too, but visually, the parent switch in the macOS application is Chat GPT <-> Codex, and within ChatGPT, there is Chat <-> Work (and within Work, there is "on your computer" and "in the cloud"). I'd naively not expect ChatGPT -> Work to share state with Codex, but this is the case for "on your computer" tasks. Also, there's still "Codex Cloud", much older and entirely separate from all of this (I think it might even predate Codex the local app?), and this also seems to live in the "Codex" parent tab on a project by project basis. None of this seems to be documented either. I literally had to start a "Hello World" project in each category to figure out what's going on.

jimmydoe 2mo ago

this is helpful piece. Claude app struggles in its UX navigation, they moved code/cowork/design a couple of times in app ui, but never confusing for users to understand what each of these three non-chat pieces does. ChatGPT sub is so confusing, OpenAI must either hate users or don't have a real product manager.