Live data from Hacker News

Understanding ChatGPT Work

simonwillison.net

21–30 of 216 posts

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

No, it's still separate. I don't know what that exploit was though, so possibly they just patched that.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#23
I just updated the article to link to this 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/cont...

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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).

Less bureaucracy should be the focus of AI marketing, rather than global superintelligent robots or smut generation

Bureaucracy is a major part of many corporate leader’s roles. That might not be the best sales line

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#26
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).

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#27
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.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#28
post #4

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 sav…

Sol Light on computer use is fantastic. I use it whenever I need to dive deep into whatever shitty web saas app menu if the API is unavailable

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#29
post #23

I just updated the article to link to this 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:…

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.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#30
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.
Post reply on HN