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 (desperately needed artifacts), 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 unification in this state? guessing there was internal pressure to juice codex's growth but, based on what im seeing, they did it by torching chatgpt?

Edit 3: Ok so it seems like ChatGPT is still around, but renamed to "ChatGPT Classic". Seems like it wont be long for this world because there's no place to download ChatGPT Classic should you choose to uninstall it. The dmg at https://chatgpt.com/download/ only contains the new ChatGPT.

I would expect the mode switcher to include a Chat mode, which would recreate the old, chat-focused UI, for asking about random topics. So, that's basically gone now. Technically, it's hidden and severely castrated.

I hope someone from OpenAI reads this. You guys have made a serious design mistake. I suspect you'll be getting a lot of support requests along the lines of "Where did all my chats go?"

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?

This observed inverse in the GUI: product first, project later could be another evidence of Conway's law [^1]

[^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

So my understanding of the differences between chat, code and co-work; but may well be wrong!

Chat is the human, talking directly to the LLM - old school. Very basic can create docs etc - but saves in a temp folder. No real access to your local PC.

Cowork / work - Human talking to an agent, which can then use tools to do work. Also runs in a container, allowing it access to your drives/computer.

Claude Code / Codex - No longer in a container, full access to the computer, depending on what permissions you give. No longer locked in a container. + The agent is more focused on coding than cowork / work.

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.

I switched because Cowork felt like a bunch of features thrown in by engineers without thought to the UX. Codex solved a lot of those issues for me - remote control from mobile has native approval dialogs, and you can start new threads from mobile - you can remote control from another laptop - computer use doesn't hijack my computer from me because it uses a11y trees instead of screenshots - it was super unclear which skills were accessible to which surface (claude chat, cowork in app, code in app, code in cli). - codex chooses the right browser profile and gets stuck less often than cowork + claude-in-chrome. I know there are 3P skills to use playwright or the chrome CDP, but I've found the native browser use most productive even if slower.

A few people here are missing the old ChatGPT app, but I found myself increasingly using Codex for casual chats too, and never using ChatGPT. You never know when the conversation might evolve to requiring tools in Codex, so no real downside to it. Yes, separation of work and personal accounts, or connecting multiple google accounts, is still unsolved on both Codex and Cowork AFAICT.

For a bit, I got FOMO because of Fable, but now it looks like 5.6 might continue the monthly model leapfrog pattern.

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.

[0] https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed

Anthropic did it right from the beginning by unifying everything in the same application. From my perspective, Codex is much better than any other app, but for non-technical users they were still stuck in ChatGPT only, and "nobody" knew about Codex. Anthropic also did it better by putting everything under the "Claude" brand: Claude Code, Claude Cowork, etc. Compared to ChatGPT vs Codex. OpenAI seems to be trying to revert that unwanted split.

With that said, I share the sentiment that it's 100% unclear what's the difference between Codex and Work. Chats now are a second-class citizen of the app. Although the "Attach to task" feature of chats looks useful. Putting "Chats" below the "Tasks" section would have been much better.

This may end up badly. Most people use ChatGPT just for regular chats, and they are not used to "agentic" interactions. It may take people time to adapt, and you can definitely lose users during that transition.

This also seems to have indirect implications regarding pricing. Codex (and Work) consume credits. Chats were also limited before, but you could mostly use ChatGPT without thinking about it. Now people will inevitably use Codex/Work more, simply because that's what the UI shows them, thus consuming credits. This will force you to keep an eye on credits a lot more.

Others have mentioned that the old ChatGPT can't be installed any more. Only if you had it installed before, it now became ChatGPT Classic. However, you can still add the chatgpt.com page as a Web App. You'll need an internet connection to use it, but the old ChatGPT app wasn't working properly without internet anyway... so the overall experience may not be that different. I'd even say that, to me, the web UI has always felt more polished than the native app.

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.

Incredible, really.

This looks like OpenAI catching up to Anthropic's Cowork.

After updating codex, it disappeared and chatdpt was still the old version. So I downloaded the latest chat gct from the website and it just said: "Couldn't install ChatGPT"

So I had to open Claude which was just a completely blank screen to try and debug the installation of ChatGPT.

A UI is supposed to help the user develop a mental model for what's happening under the covers. But what's happening when you switch from ChatGPT Work to ChatGPT Codex? If I switch it while in an existing session, nothing seems to happen. Does that mean it did nothing? If so, why let the user switch it at all.

When I switch it in the new conversation state, the help text changes from "What should we build?" to "What should we get done?". As near as I can tell, the switch gives me access to different sets of tools. But does that mean that some tools are not available in both modes? Why? Why not let the agent access all tools and pick the one based on context? Why are you forcing me to choose up front? And what happens if I choose poorly?

I get that OpenAI is moving fast, but I feels like a single round of usability testing might have helped.

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Edit: I just got the update – the new ChatGPT.app is 1.46 GB

Admittedly, I was already using Codex a bit like Claude Cowork. I'm just surprised they decided to merge threads.

As a ChatGPT Plus user, the maximum effort level I can set in the Chat tab is "High", but in the Work tab I can set it to "Extra High" and even "Max".

If you're gonna try and make people use one app for everything, at least make it differently optimized between modes. And how are you supposed to chat with ChatGPT while Codex works on a technical task?! (once they retire Classic)

Regarding "ChatGPT Work" vs "ChatGPT Codex" - In Work diffs are gone and in new chats there's a popup proposing creating docs or sheets. That's it I believe.

[1] to use this "greater" we have to imagine we live in the fantasy world where we can measure it in one dimension.

Why did they break a perfectly working system.

Instead of keeping Codex work isolated, now I have to deal with other constant changing bloat.

EDIT 1: I just want a list of my chats. Insane how they butchered their app. Work sounds nice until yo find out that none of the plugins work for my apps and there 5 hour are usage limits like CC does them.

EDIT 2: This is trash. They buried chats so deep in the new app they're unusable now. The whole list is hidden, and yo can't search for chats anymore. Also my projects are gone on macOS. In the iOS app my latest project has become a pinned folder? A function that doesn't even exist in the macOS app.

EDIT 3: Managed to get the old version back using home-brew. OpenAI help pages say the old app should remain as ChatGPT Classic but it didn't for me and there is no download offered.

I'm not interested in Work.

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

Edit: I found them back in the 'classic' version of the app. Wildly confusing what is going to happen to the data there, chats, projects, custom GPT's.

This is going to be fun tomorrow when everyone at the company I work at finds out all their chats, projects and GPT’s are ‘gone’ after they ‘update’. And not a word about this switcheroo ‘data loss’ in their comms. Wow.

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.