I've loved using Cowork recently for sourcing decisions. Things where seemingly everyone's out of stock or questionably reputable, just let Cowork spin for 20 minutes, find the best new and best used options that meet your requirements, probably also suggesting a different item that does the job and is available for cheap. I've done it enough that I'm starting to loathe clicking through these sites myself.
Now the 'ChatGPT desktop app' (the Codex app, renamed) also has the split between work and code, and as far as I can tell, all it does is change which plugins are loaded by default to include Office ones when you put it in work mode. Perhaps it also changes the system prompt slightly?
Worse still: what happens when your workflow involves both coding and general knowledge work? Are you expected to switch apps, or switch settings? To me, it sounds very confusing and inefficient, and not at all what I was expecting.
They have, if you try to download ChatGPT app, it actually downloads codex now, and the first screen is "Codex is now the ChatGPT App"
I guess it's supposed to be a part of ChatGPT now, but I cannot see any update there yet.
btw I kinda hate this, because ChatGPT was always very slow for me - possibly due to amount of historical threads I have there
But what happened to ChatGPT? Where am I supposed to casually chat?
Also, when you toggle btween ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex, nothing changes. This is super confusing. Can someone from the OpenAI team clarify the difference btwn the modes? Does chatgpt work have more business-y related plugins turned on by default?
Edit: So it seems like the only place you can actually chat with chatgpt is in an awkward homeless nested window. idk. The chatgpt interface wasn't great, but I still used it a lot. I can't see this change going well with a lot of the casual users.
Edit2: In their awkward homeless nested chat mode, you cannot even edit past messages. this is a mess, why was the team so zealous to pull the switch on this unification in this state?
Very confusing. But I do find it potentially interesting to treat general office work no differently from coding, which is something I had already been using Codex for in many ways before today
I can get some useful results from codex at work, because I have to, except for when I don't. I accept that risk factor and compensate by reviewing _everything_ it spits out.
But we all know what coding is, in a very broad stroke manner, sure.
What does an end of month report mean? I automatically increase the font size when I send the spreadsheet to Paul. I review tickets and provide a meta write-up on Friday. Or maybe Monday, because Fred didn't get back to me until 5:30 Friday, and I closed my laptop at 4.
These are just little things, and they're repetitive, but each time, there's some little idiosyncracy. I have reservations regarding any piece of software being able to finesse that.
Admittedly, I was already using Codex a bit like Claude Cowork. I'm just surprised they decided to merge threads.
Agents-on-your-machine clearly have their place, but for many workflows this is too unruly. Hence, the "long-running agent running on shared infra" pattern.
I think this is where the ball is headed. I'm building towards an open source version of this[0]. Still just working on the core, but hopefully soon self-hosted versions can be built on top.
patabyte•1h ago
This looks like OpenAI catching up to Anthropic's Cowork.
wahnfrieden•43m ago